An American man, Brad Malagarie, has suffered a stroke hours after taking the single-dose COVID-19 vaccine produced by Johnson & Johnson.
News station, WLOX quoted the victim’s family as saying that the 43-year-old man from St Martin, Mississippi, suffered a stroke following a blood clot in his brain, which they adjudged to be a reaction to the vaccine.
Malagarie, a father of seven, was said to have left his office last week to take the COVID-19 jab.
Three hours after his return to the office, his co-workers noticed that he was unresponsive at his desk and immediately called emergency services.
He was rushed to hospital, where he was diagnosed with a stroke.
“They called me and said he had that vaccine and something is wrong, we think it’s a stroke,” his aunt and boss, Celeste Foster O’Keefe, told WLOX.
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O’Keefe said that Malagarie’s only health issue before he took the vaccine was high blood pressure, which he controlled with medication.
Since taking the jab last week, she said, the victim has been confined to a hospital in New Orleans, Louisiana in critical but stable condition.
“He can’t talk now and he can’t walk. He’s paralysed on the right side. He knows who we are and he will just cry when he sees us,” she said.
“At least we want him to be able to communicate, to be able to walk and talk again, even if it’s not perfect.”
Johnson & Johnson disclosed two more cases of rare blood clot in recipients of its COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday.
On Tuesday, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration recommended a “pause” to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to pave way for investigation of reports of rare but potentially dangerous blood clots.
The two government agencies said they were looking into unusual clots in six women between the ages of 18 and 48, in which one of the victims died.