Norway warns of vaccine risks for sick patients over 80 – economic, financial and trade news

he Norwegian Institute of Public Health warned that vaccines against coronavirus can be risky for those over 80 and terminally ill patients.

Norwegian officials said that among all those vaccinated so far, 29 people suffered side effects, 23 of them fatalities. All of the deaths were in nursing homes and all were over 80 years old.

“Fever and nausea may have caused the death of some weak patients. For the most fragile people, even the relatively mild side effects of the vaccine can have serious consequences, ” he said. Sigurd Hortemo, Chief Medical Officer of the Norwegian Medicines Agency, in the agency’s first report on side effects.

More than 30,000 people received the first dose of Pfizer or Moderna vaccine in the Scandinavian country since the end of December, according to official figures.

“We are not alarmed by this. It is clear that these vaccines present very few risks, with one small exception in the case of the weakest patients, ”said the Agency Medical Director, Steinar Madsen, at the station NRK.

The health agency added in its report that “for those with a very short life expectancy, the benefit of the vaccine may be marginal or irrelevant anyway.”

The recommendation does not mean that younger and healthier people should avoid getting the vaccine. But it’s an early indication of what to watch out for as countries begin to publish vaccine safety surveillance reports.

Emer Cooke, the new director of the European Medicines Agency, said monitoring the safety of Covid vaccines, especially those that rely on new technologies such as messenger RNA, will be one of the biggest challenges once vaccines are widely implemented.

Pfizer and BioNTech work with Norwegian regulator to investigate deaths in NorwayPfizer said in an emailed statement. The agency found that “the number of incidents to date is not alarming and is in line with expectations,” Pfizer said.

Until now, allergic reactions were rare. In the United States, authorities reported 21 cases of severe allergic reactions between December 14 and 23 after receiving approximately 1.9 million initial doses of the vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE. That’s an incidence of 11.1 cases per million doses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Norway has administered at least one dose to some 33,000 people, focusing on those considered most at risk if they contract the virus, including the elderly. The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine approved late last year has been used more widely, and now a similar injection from Moderna Inc. approved earlier this month is also being administered.