California public health officials are warning health care providers to stop using a specific batch of COVID-19 vaccines after a higher than normal number of patients suffered "severe" allergic reactions.
State epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan said providers should avoid using a specific lot of the Moderna vaccines pending an investigation.
She said that less than 10 people at a San Diego clinic needed medical attention after getting their shot, but that is a higher number than expected as allergic reactions are considered extremely rare.
"Nobody died, everybody’s okay, but it did cause more severe allergic reactions than are typically seen in a cluster of people," said Dr. John Swartzberg, clinical professor emeritus at UC Berkeley School of Public Health, and infectious disease expert.
The warning applies to a batch of 330,000 doses that arrived in California between Jan. 5-12, making up about 10% of the doses the state has received so far. Even without those doses, the state does have a backlog of more than 1.5 million doses of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
"Out of an abundance of caution, they’ve pulled out that batch and they’re not going to use it until it gets studied much better. But we still have plenty of Moderna vaccine from other batches, and there’s nothing that we’ve seen that suggests that there’s a problem with severe allergic reactions with all the other batches of Moderna."
While allergic reactions to vaccines can be serious, they are easily treatable.
Public health experts and physicians have advised that everyone wait in their doctor's office for up to 15 minutes after getting vaccinated in case of an allergic reaction, which is common practice with other vaccines as well.
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