Twenty-three elderly people died in Norway, shortly after receiving the Pfizer’s mRNA-based coronavirus vaccine.
“All the deaths have occurred in frail, elderly patients in nursing homes. All are over 80 years old and some of them over 90,” Norwegian media NRK reported.
The Norwegian Medicines Agency on its website asserted that 13 of the 23 people who died have shown common side effects of mRNA vaccines such as diarrhea, nausea and fever.
The country has also launched a detailed investigation into the reported fatalities that has shocked the world. Doctors in Norway have been asked to conduct more thorough evaluations of very frail elderly patients in line to receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, following the reported deaths.
“We are not alarmed by this,” Steinar Madsen, medical director with the agency, told Norwegian broadcaster NRK. “It is quite clear that these vaccines have very little risk, with a small exception for the frailest patients.”
“Doctors must now carefully consider who should be vaccinated,” he added. “Those who are very frail and at the very end of life can be vaccinated after an individual assessment.”
Meanwhile, Chinese experts said the death incident should be assessed cautiously to understand whether the death was caused by vaccines or other pre-existing conditions of these individuals.
Besides, the Chinese publication Global Times said that health experts in the country have called on Norway and other countries to suspend the use of Pfizer’s mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccine.
A Chinese immunologist claimed that the new mRNA vaccine was developed in haste and had never been used on a large scale for the prevention of infectious disease, and its safety had not been confirmed for large-scale use in humans.
