Carlos Tejada, a New York Times Deputy Asia Editor, has died at the age of 49. He suffered a heart attack less than a day after posting to social media that he had received a Moderna booster vaccination. Tejada, who worked in part on the paper’s COVID-19 coverage, was married with two children. He had worked at the Wall Street Journal prior to moving to the Times, where he worked for almost five years.
According to Tejada’s own Instagram page, he was grateful to receive the mRNA/LNP booster while in Seoul, South Korea. Tejada originally received the Johnson & Johnson DNA/AAV COVID-19 vaccination in July 2021. Less than a day after receiving his Moderna booster on December 17th, Tejada died of a heart attack. The news was shared via Tejada’s social media by his wife Nora the following morning. The Times confirmed his death on December 22nd.
Former NY Times journalist Alex Berenson reported on his Substack that Tejada did not given informed consent to receive the booster shot, as the consent form was written in Korea and Tejada did not read Korean.
On his social media, Tejada joked that Omicron could “hit [him] with your wet snot,” before going on to say, “all I had to do was fill out this form in a language I cant read. Translation software tells me I now belong to the BTS army.”
The NY Times has thus far made no reference to Tejada having received his booster shot just hours before his premature death. To this, Berenson, a former employee of the newspaper, said he hoped that Tejada’s death would finally “wake the Times.”
