“If We Don't Do It, No One Will:” How a Doctor Put Her Passion Aside During the Pandemic
By Casey Bacot for COMM-320 at American University
From mask mandates to remote workplaces, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the course of every American’s life. Teachers learned how to use online applications such as Zoom, restaurants had to adapt to a larger influx of carryout orders, and Dr. Kimberly Blumenthal stepped away from her passion and began researching adverse reactions to the COVID-19 vaccine.
Dr. Blumenthal is an allergist and immunologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. While her background includes a wide range of studies including economics and internal medicine, she said when deciding on her career path she focused on the importance of loving your work.
She found her passion for allergy and immunology during her internal medicines residency at MGH. Her first love within the field is penicillin allergy, specifically the misinformation and misdiagnoses that are involved with it.
“Of the 32 million patients in the US who report a penicillin allergy, less than 5% of patients are truly allergic,” she said in an interview with the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma & Immunology in 2016. This can cause millions of individuals to be neglected the proper treatment for problems they may be facing.
“I wanted to feel like what I do matters,” she explained while sitting in her office during a break in her busy day. That is why she found a new interest during the pandemic: chronic urticaria after the COVID-19 vaccine.
When vaccine rollouts began in December of 2020 in the UK, Dr. Blumenthal and her colleagues at MGH were called upon to begin advising other medical professionals on how to respond to certain skin reactions.
“We jumped into action and tried really hard to quickly come up with useful guidelines,” said Dr. Anna Wolfson, a clinician working on Dr. Blumenthal’s research team. “We knew that our colleagues who are not allergists at our institutions would be asking a lot of questions.”
As a physician herself, when vaccines began to be implemented, she looked for reactionary trends among her patients.
“We've never widespread vaccinated a whole population with an mRNA vaccine, but we knew what could happen. [Urticaria] was something that we were seeing a lot and put two and two together, the timing is often the same,” she explained about seeing an influx of chronic urticaria in patients.
“It wasn't really until we saw enough patients with chronic hives that were like, well, we should collect these differently,” she said while explaining the online case registry that her team created to document cases of urticaria.
Although Dr. Blumenthal is working countless hours to research this reaction, that effort will make little change unless it is funded. She explained that this research is pushed aside currently because it is a quality of life issue rather than a life or death issue.
While Blumenthal has enjoyed conducting research related to the COVID-19 vaccine, she explained that this is not a permanent change to her profession.
“This is a nice, you know, I feel like it's been, it's nice to be useful to a pandemic situation,” she said. “I tell everybody, my first love is penicillin allergy. I'm a drug allergist. I love drug allergy. I love antibiotic allergy. Because I love treating infectious diseases.”
Julia Buck who suffers from chronic urticaria from the vaccine explained, “I am not concerned because I know there are people working on it. There is good science being conducted, but it takes a lot of time. Dr. Kimberly Blumenthal is one of those researchers working on it.”
Dr. Blumenthal’s research will be used far into the future as it has given a powerful insight into the world of mRNA vaccines. She hopes that as the pandemic subsides, patients will still look to her and her team and its research to provide the assistance that they may need.
She is correct in her assumptions that a doctor’s attention will provide necessary relief in the minds of patients. Individuals suffering from this reaction have rejoiced in hearing that somebody is finally working towards finding answers to this seemingly untreatable reaction.
“I am so relieved to see that this is being monitored, discussed, and brought to the forefront!!!” said Nathalie Elias in response to a post regarding Blumenthal’s research on Facebook.
Dr. Blumenthal understands the importance of her research. She hopes to soon find answers for those who are facing this issue because she believes “if [she doesn’t] do the studies, no one will.”
