Officials say Juneau healthcare worker anaphylactic reaction to COVID-19 vaccine was country’s first

A health worker in Juneau had an anaphylactic reaction on Tuesday and was hospitalized in the intensive care unit after being injected with the COVID-19 vaccine produced by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and BioNTech, officials said on Wednesday.

The woman spent the night in intensive care at Bartlett Regional Hospital in Juneau and was removed from epinephrine early Wednesday, officials said at a news conference. She is expected to be discharged from the hospital on Thursday, according to a press release from the hospital.

And despite her reaction, the woman was still excited to have received the vaccine and was disappointed to lose the opportunity to get a second dose a few weeks later, said Noble Anderson, one of her doctors.

“She encouraged us all to keep going,” Anderson said at a press conference Wednesday.

The New York Times first reported the reaction on Wednesday morning.

The woman’s anaphylactic reaction is the only one reported in the country to date, CDC deputy director for infectious diseases Dr Jay Butler said at the press conference. And the state is not planning any changes to its COVID-19 vaccine distribution schedule, said Dr. Anne Zink, chief medical officer of Alaska.

“There were over 40,000 people in the trials and we didn’t see any such reaction,” she said.

Zink summed up the event by relaying a comment from one of the providers who dealt with the woman’s reaction: “Lightning is going to strike somewhere.”

A second healthcare worker at Bartlett Regional Hospital had a milder allergic reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday.

Within minutes of receiving the injection, a male hospital staff member had mild symptoms of an allergic reaction, including swollen eyes, sore throat and dizziness.

His reaction is not considered anaphylaxis. He was treated in the emergency room and released within an hour.

Regulators had previously warned medical providers to be on the lookout for allergies after reporting that two British health workers also experienced anaphylactic reactions when injected with the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine last week. Alaska hospitals keep vaccine recipients under observation for a period of time after their injections.

Pfizer said there were “no safety signals of concern” identified in its clinical vaccine trials and that anaphylactic reactions to vaccines in general are rare, estimated at just over one dose per million.

The woman’s symptoms started 10 minutes after the vaccine was injected, when she felt red while still being watched in the hospital lobby, officials said. She took a Benadryl but still felt short of breath and was transferred to the emergency room, said Lindy Jones, the doctor who treated her there.

Jones was concerned about an anaphylactic reaction and gave the woman “standard treatment” of epinephrine, and she “responded immediately,” he said. She also received other antihistamines, including Benadryl and Pepsid, as well as steroids, which Jones described as another standard treatment for anaphylaxis.

Because the woman’s symptoms reappeared when she was taken off the adrenaline, she was transferred to intensive care for observation and kept overnight. The providers plan to release her on Wednesday evening, “assuming there are no more symptoms now that she is out of medication,” Jones said.

CDC employees are now working with Bartlett clinicians to analyze the results of lab tests given to the Juneau woman “so they can learn more from this experience,” Zink said.

“The system has worked exactly as you hope it would in this situation, to make sure we are able to respond and learn,” she said.

Bartlett, with the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, was one of the first locations in the state to inject workers with the COVID-19 vaccine on Tuesday. Bartlett officials said 96 people had been vaccinated at the hospital.

ANMC spokeswoman Shirley Young said no allergic reactions had occurred at Anchorage Hospital.

This story has been updated.