Only one of the 30,000 people who have received the Covid-19 vaccine in New York City so far has had a severe adverse reaction to the shooting, city officials said Wednesday.
A nurse in the city suffered anaphylaxis after receiving Pfizer Inc.
-BiodNTech SE injection. The unidentified worker is in stable condition, officials said.
A spokesman for the city’s health department did not provide additional information about the worker. The department is working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to look at other side effects of the vaccine, officials said.
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“We will continue to monitor those events and make sure we take them seriously,” Dave Chokshi, the city’s health commissioner, told a news conference Wednesday. He added that the severe side effect was unusual and that vaccines are generally very safe.
As of Dec. 18, there have been six reports of allergic reactions to the Pfizer-BioNTech shooting in the United States, according to the CDC. To date, more than 272,000 doses of vaccine have been administered.
The UK reported two cases of vaccine anaphylaxis earlier this month, according to the CDC.
To date, 89,000 people across New York have received the first dose of Covid-19 vaccine, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday.
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As he develops his agenda for next year, the Democratic governor said he is trying to combine economic activity with social distancing. “The balance will be, how do you use vaccinations and testing to determine safety?” Mr. Cuomo said.
The state has given priority to vaccinations for health workers, as well as for residents and nursing staff.
On Wednesday, emergency medical workers from the New York Fire Department began receiving the vaccine. FDNY Commissioner Daniel Nigro told a news conference that nearly 6,000 FDNY employees have contracted Covid-19 since the pandemic began.
“We hope to be able to vaccinate 450 people a day in three locations and start bringing this protection, this miracle that has come to us, and start putting Covid behind us,” Mr Nigro said.
Meanwhile, the number of Covid-19 patients in New York hospitals rose again on Tuesday to 6,864, state officials said. Officials said 164 people in the state died on Tuesday from the virus, and of the 204,361 coronavirus tests reported to the state, 5.84% were positive.
Write to Katie Honan to [email protected] and Jimmy Vielkind to [email protected]
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It appeared in the December 24, 2020 print edition as “The health worker has had severe side effects from the vaccine.”