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Following these deaths, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health has updated its Covid-19 vaccination guide with more detailed advice on vaccinating frail or terminally ill elderly people.
The new guidelines say doctors should assess each patient individually to determine whether the benefits of the vaccination outweigh the risks of potential side effects.
Last Thursday, 42,000 people in Norway received their first dose of the vaccine. As is the case in many other countries, older people and people living in nursing homes with underlying health conditions are the first to get vaccinated because they are at a much higher risk of become seriously ill from Covid-19.
RENTAL noted that all deaths occurring in the first days after vaccination “are carefully assessed” and submitted to the Norwegian ADR health registry.
Dr Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on Monday that the deaths must be seen in the context of the population in which they occurred – a nursing home with extremely fragile people.
Speaking at the Choose Healthy Lives Black Clergy Conclave, Fauci said he understood the deaths followed the booster dose of the vaccine when there were more non-specific symptoms, such as pain, fever. and discomfort.
“It’s conceivable that when you have a very fragile person, like a lot of those who are in nursing homes, that even this amount of stress on them could put them on top,” Fauci added.
Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said that to date there was “no evidence that a link between vaccination and the death of these vulnerable patients is causal”.
Evans told the UK’s Science Media Center that when people at high risk of death get vaccinated, “there will be a number of accidental deaths that will occur soon after vaccination.”
Regulators around the world are closely monitoring these deaths, Evans said, and are able to calculate the “expected number” of deaths over different time periods.
“We don’t know yet, but it would appear that the number of observed deaths is not significantly higher than expected numbers,” he said, adding that there was “no need for anxiety, but complacency is just as wrong “.
Fauci agreed with that assessment, saying the first question was what the nursing home death rate was among people who had never received the vaccine. “Once you get that, you’ll have the real denominator,” he says.
Of the 23 deaths, 13 have so far been assessed by the Norwegian Medicines Agency and the National Institute of Public Health, the institute said in a statement on Friday.
Sigurd Hortemo, chief medical officer for the Norwegian Medicines Agency, said evaluations suggest that common adverse reactions to mRNA vaccines, such as fever and nausea, may have contributed to a fatal outcome in some fragile patients.
“We cannot exclude that adverse reactions to the vaccine occurring in the first days after vaccination (such as fever and nausea) may contribute to a more serious and fatal course in patients with severe underlying disease” , the statement added.
Pfizer said in a statement to CNN on Saturday that it was aware of the reported deaths and that “our immediate thoughts are with the bereaved families.”
Pfizer added that it was working with NOMA to pull together all the relevant information.
“Norwegian authorities have prioritized the vaccination of residents of nursing homes, most of whom are very old with underlying medical conditions and some who are terminally ill,” Pfizer said in a statement, adding that NOMA said that “the number of incidents so far is not alarming and as expected.”
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