April 10, 2021- 1:41 p.m
A Brooklyn woman who managed to avoid catching COVID-19 throughout 2020 went down with the bug this month — three weeks after being vaccinated.
Ashley Allen, 31, spoke to The Post by phone while quarantined in her Williamsburg apartment and in between calls from city contact tracers.
The contact tracers “started asking me questions about what I was doing three weeks ago,” Allen said. “And I said I was getting vaccinated.”
Allen was thrilled when she was able to book an appointment for the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine at the Javits Center on March 10.
The sprawling convention space had just received new shipments of vaccine and was jabbing New Yorkers around the clock — Allen’s appointment was at 2 a.m. As a wine and spirits distributor, she was able to get a coveted early spot even while vaccines remained unavailable to most New Yorkers. Though she experienced a brief fever the next day, her side effects from the jab quickly resolved.
She’s shot out of luck.
“On Wednesday, March 31, I started feeling like a scratch, a tickle in my throat of some sort. It was super dry,” she recalled. “Then I kept having this dry cough. It kinda felt like I had allergies.”
As her cough persisted, debilitating fatigue set in.
“It started getting really bad, to the point where I did go to City MD,” she said.“I thought I had Lyme disease. I spend a lot of time upstate.”
But a rapid coronavirus test on April 4, plus a second rapid test on April 5, showed COVID. A PCR test, which is more accurate, confirmed it.
The City MD staffer “asked when did you get your vaccine? And I said March 10, and she was like just shocked,” Allen said.
Allen’s case is rare, experts say, but not unheard of.
“The vaccine does not necessarily prevent you from getting COVID. It prevents you from being hospitalized or dying from it,” Dr. Kris Bungay, a Manhattan primary care physician, told The Post. “That is why we all still have to be careful.”
“It was not common in the clinical trials for patients to be symptomatic after getting vaccinated.” Bungay added.
Moderna’s and Pfizer’s two-dose vaccines are 94% and 95% effective, respectively, at preventing new coronavirus infections, according to the Centers for Disease Control. And while it’s more convenient, the single shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine only provides 66% protection.
Sporadic cases of post-vaccine horror stories have popped up in local news around the country, but it remains unclear how many people have come down with COVID after receiving the shots, known as “vaccine breakthrough.”
“While there are anecdotal reports of New Yorkers who have had a positive COVID test 14 or more days after receiving their last vaccine dose, DOH is investigating these cases further to determine if they meet the formal CDC definition of vaccine breakthrough,” Jill Montag, a state Department of Health spokeswoman, told The Post.
As Allen recuperates, she is unable to pinpoint where she was exposed. “Not a single clue,” she said. “If I had to take a wild guess, and still not sure, I think Target. At Atlantic Terminal, in the elevator.”
