Britons with severe allergies don’t get a vaccine, and that is …

Anyone who has had a serious allergic reaction to anything in the past should not get vaccinated against corona. In the United Kingdom, two health workers developed severe symptoms after being vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine.

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Two British health workers developed severe symptoms on Wednesday shortly after receiving the Pfizer vaccine. Few details are known, but the two did bring emergency medication. Also includes an adrenaline auto-injector, which suggests they’ve had reactions in the past. The two are now doing well, but the British are now applying the precautionary principle: people who have a history of serious allergic reactions will not receive a corona vaccine for the time being.

Here it is not yet described so precisely in the vaccine strategy, but perhaps our country will too. “When administering different vaccines to pupils, or the well-known flu vaccine, the doctor always asks whether serious allergic reactions have occurred before. That will probably not be any different now, ”says immunologist Corinne Vandermeulen from KU Leuven.

The chance of an allergic reaction due to vaccination is 1 to 1.5 in a million, according to vaccinologist Geert Leroux-Roels (UGent). It is remarkable that it already happened twice in the first week of the vaccination campaign. “But the employees knew they were at risk. Perhaps they consciously made a trade-off between being infected with the coronavirus and having a serious allergic reaction in an admittedly controlled environment. ”

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People with severe allergies were excluded from the outset in Pfizer’s studies. So we don’t know what vaccination does to them. 0.63 percent of the subjects had an allergic reaction. “That’s why we don’t let people go home immediately after a vaccination,” says Vandermeulen. “We keep them under surveillance for 15 minutes to be sure to intervene should an allergic reaction occur.”

READ ALSO. Pfizer releases vaccine package insert: what are the side effects and why should you wait two months after injection before starting children?

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