A physician in Boston in the United States suffered a severe allergic reaction after receiving the Moderna vaccine on Thursday, The New York Times reported.

The doctor, Dr Hossein Sadrzadeh, a geriatric oncology fellow at Boston Medical Center, shared that he had a shellfish allergy.

The severe reaction followed immediately after he got the shot. His blood pressure plummeted as he got drenched in a cold sweat and felt dizzy. His heart rate had spiked to 150 beats per minute, about twice its normal cadence, he said in an interview with The New York Times.

“It was the same anaphylactic reaction that I experience with shellfish,” Dr Sadrzadeh said.

"My heart rate was 150, my normal heart rate is 75 but ... six, seven minutes after the injection of the vaccine, I felt in my tongue and also my throat having, like, some weird sensation of tingling and numbness, the same reaction that I had before to my shellfish allergy," he told CNN.

He has now fully recovered. “I don’t want anybody to go through that,” Dr Sadrzadeh said.

David Kibbe, a spokesman for Boston Medical Center, gave a statement on the matter, saying that Dr Sadrzadeh “felt he was developing an allergic reaction and was allowed to self-administer his personal EpiPen. He was taken to the Emergency Department, evaluated, treated, observed and discharged. He is doing well today.”

This was the first week of the national rollout of the candidate vaccine in the US.

The incident has been reported to both Moderna and a national vaccine safety surveillance system run by the FDA. and the CDC, NYT reported.

The allergic reaction is the first severe event linked to the Moderna vaccine so far. Regulators are evaluating at least six cases of anaphylaxis reported after the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was administered during the first few weeks.

It must be noted that such reactions are rare, but do happen with other vaccines as well, including the flu vaccine.

(With inputs from The New York Times)