Norway officials: No link between COVID-19 vaccine and deaths of 33 elderly recipients

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• Norway has initially arranged vaccination of the senior patients admitted in nursing homes, noting that underlying health conditions may be aggravated by the side-effects of the shot.
• Health officials say there’s no link that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine would lead to death.
• Experts said earlier that deaths after injections in high-risk people would lead to confusion.

Health officials in Norway move to alleviate safety alarms over the death of some senior patients after they were administered with coronavirus vaccine, explaining there’s no evidence yet about the relationship between the two.

Norway’s preliminary reports have heightened health concerns as global experts watch out for initial signs of possible vaccine side effects. While doctors believed that there’s a possibility for aggravation of existing conditions rooting from vaccine side-effects, they also said that the weakest elderly patients will be the most affected since deaths are common after vaccination in these cases.

During a phone interview on Monday, Norwegian Medicines Agency medical director, Steinar Madsen, said that “COVID-19 is far more dangerous to most patients than vaccination,” adding that they are not alarmed since the link between the shots and reported deaths are difficult to substantiate.

As per the agency’s latest statistics, 33 people in Norway aged 75 and up have died after the inoculation, adding that all are already severely sick before the shot.

The Scandinavian country has finished giving the vaccine to most of its nursing home residents, bringing the total to 48,000 individuals vaccinated by Monday afternoon.

Madsen said the recorded deaths are less than 1 out of 1,000 nursing facility patients to be immunized, noting that the side effects of the vaccine he said. The side effects of immunization can, in a few instances, “tip the patients into a more serious course of the underlying disease.”

Other nations such as Israel and Germany also have listed casualties from the people they vaccinated, without determining underlying links.

On Monday, the government-assigned Hong Kong vaccine expert panel said that it’s pursuing more information from both the Germans and Norwegians on cases comprising the Pfizer-BioNTech shot, which has been authorized in the region.

Authorities on vaccines and the elderly had anticipated earlier that deaths after immunizations in high-risk people would create misperception.

Associate professor of medicine at Vanderbilt University and vaccine use adviser for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Keipp Talbot, said that old and frail individuals naturally die and many don’t recognize that.  He said that he’s concerned that they “would introduce vaccine, and people would think it was killing people.”

Talbot was the only expert on the CDC consultation board to endorse against using coronavirus vaccines initially to the sick and elderly people over concerns that unavoidable deaths following the injection would make the public doubt the shots.

Source: Bloomberg