One of the main things that scares people that are vaccine hesitant is the fear that they might get an allergic reaction to the vaccine. We know that allergic reactions were super-rare in the clinical trials (each of which followed about 30,000 people). Now that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have been deployed – we have even more data demonstrating that allergic reactions are extremely rare.
More than 4,000,000 vaccines have been given in the community now (100x times more people than a clinical trial), greatly expanding our knowledge about the safety of the vaccines. The CDC will be publishing reports on what has been happening in the field regarding vaccine safety from time to time.
Last Thursday CDC published in new MMWR entitled: Allergic Reactions Including Anaphylaxis After Receipt of the First Dose of Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine: December 21, 2020–January 10, 2021
The report found, as expected, that so far allergic reactions to the vaccines have been exceedingly rare. Between December 21, 2020 and January 10, 2021 there had been 10 allergic reactions to the vaccine among the more than 4,000,000 people that have received a dose. That’s equal to 2.5 cases per million doses. In 9 of the 10 cases the reaction happened within 15 minutes of vaccination. No anaphylaxis-related deaths were reported.