The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is searching for participants in a study of rare but severe allergic reactions to Pfizer's COVID-19 vaccine.
Daniel Rotrosen, director of the Division of Allergy, Immunology and Transplantation at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told The Washington Post that researchers need people who have a history of severe anaphylaxis.
“This is not a simple study design,” Rotrosen said. “We expect to be looking at highly allergic individuals. They will be not necessarily so easy to recruit, either. A lot still needs to be done to be sure we have the optimal study design. That said, we’re trying to move as quickly as we can, for obvious reasons.”
The first doses of Pfizer's coronavirus vaccine were administered to doctors, nurses and other front-line health care workers last week, with only a handful of side effects reported in some pockets of the country.
Nearly 2 million people around the world have already been vaccinated, according to some reports.
In England, two cases of severe allergic reactions were dismissed by public health officials as an anomaly.
A second vaccine, made by Moderna, was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration last week and its first doses are expected to be administered across the country this week.
For NIH's proposed study on the Pfizer vaccine, the agency would sample hundreds of patients from various locations around the country.
“Such a study would include baseline clinical and laboratory evaluations of participants, administration of the vaccine(s) under close observation, and clinical and laboratory follow-up to assess immune or allergic reactivity,” Rotrosen told the Post. ...
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