Severe allergic reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech were “rare” in the first 10 days of its rollout across the country, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
A total of 21 cases of anaphylaxis — none of them fatal — has been confirmed among nearly 1.9 million doses administered, CDC researchers wrote Wednesday in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. That works out to 11.1 cases per 1 million doses.
Anaphylaxis is a severe allergic reaction that can be triggered by a vaccine, as well as by food, medication, insect stings and latex. The reaction can be fatal if not treated immediately, typically with an injection of epinephrine to open airways in the lungs.
The reports of anaphylaxis and other side effects to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were made to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), which is maintained by the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration to keep track of safety issues once a vaccine is made available to the public.
Pfizer-BioNTech’s COVID-19 vaccine was the first to receive emergency use authorization from U.S. regulators, and the first doses went into the arms of frontline healthcare workers Dec. 14.
—Los Angeles Times
WASHINGTON — Suspected Russian hackers broke into the Department of Justice’s email system and may have also compromised the U.S. federal judiciary’s electronic filing and case management system, authorities said on Wednesday.
The intrusions are part of a massive cyberattack that utilized malicious code implanted in Orion software by Texas-based SolarWinds Corp., which is widely used in government and the private sector for network management.
In late December, the Justice Department “learned of previously unknown malicious activity linked to the global SolarWinds incident that has affected multiple federal agencies and technology contractors, among others,” Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi said Wednesday in a statement. He added that hackers were able to access the Department’s Microsoft Corp. Office 365 email accounts.
“At this point, the number of potentially accessed O365 mailboxes appears limited to around 3% and we have no indication that any classified systems were impacted,” Raimondi said. The Department of Justice, which found the hack on Dec. 24, has “eliminated the identified method by which the actor was accessing the 0365 email environment,” according to a statement.
—Bloomberg News
Twitter and Facebook on Wednesday removed a video posted by President Donald Trump in which he falsely claimed that the November election was stolen from him and asked rioters who breached the U.S. Capitol to go home even as he praised them.
In the video, Trump said that he won in a “landslide election” and that the protesters who stormed the Capitol building were “very special.”
Twitter also said it had locked the commander in chief’s account, citing an egregious violation of its policies.
“This is an emergency situation and we are taking appropriate emergency measures, including removing President Trump’s video,” Guy Rosen, Facebook’s vice president for integrity, wrote on social media. “We removed it because on balance we believe it contributes to rather than diminishes the risk of ongoing violence.”
Twitter removed the video shortly after Facebook.
Multiple Twitter posts from the president — who lost the election by more than 7 million votes — were plastered over with the words: “This Tweet is no longer available.”
—New York Daily News
LOS ANGELES — Coronavirus infections in California reached 2.5 million Wednesday, another alarming milestone that underscores an unprecedented surge that has overwhelmed hospitals and is expected to worsen in the coming weeks.
According to The Times tracker, 1 of every 16 people in the state has tested positive for the virus at some point during the pandemic, with the number of new cases exploding by more than 1 million in less than a month.
The numbers show how rapidly the coronavirus is spreading, with some areas like Los Angeles County, the Inland Empire and Central Valley particularly hard hit.
Officials have said stay-at-home measures imposed in late November have helped — but a rise in travel and social gatherings amid a slew of winter holidays have take a heavy toll.
L.A. County reached another distressing milestone, surpassing 11,000 COVID-19 deaths Tuesday.
—Los Angeles Times
