CDC study: Severe allergic reactions to coronavirus vaccines happening at a higher rate than flu vaccines

Severe allergic reactions to COVID-19 vaccines are happening at a higher rate than adverse reactions to flu vaccines, federal health officials said on Jan. 6.

Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that the reactions, known as anaphylaxis, are happening at a rate of 11.1 per million vaccinations. With flu vaccines, anaphylaxis occurs at a rate of 1.3 per 1 million injections.

“The anaphylaxis rate for COVID-19 vaccines may seem high compared to flu vaccines, but I want to reassure you, this is still a rare outcome,” Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, told reporters on a call.

Twenty-one people experienced severe allergic reactions out of those who received the first 1.89 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, which were administered between Dec. 14 and Dec. 23, 2020.

Seventeen of the people who experienced severe allergic reactions had a history of allergies or allergic reactions. The average time between getting a shot and symptom onset was 13 minutes; most patients experienced symptoms within 15 minutes. The median age of the patients was 40 years old.

Information available for 20 of the 21 showed they’d recovered or had been discharged, the CDC said in a report.

Eighty-six other cases were determined to be allergic reactions that weren’t severe. Sixty-one were considered nonallergic adverse events. The remaining seven are still under investigation.

There’s no federal database of confirmed allergic reactions. The report doesn’t include data for the past two weeks. Approximately 3.4 million doses have been administered since the time period studied in the report.

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