Norway said Monday no link had been established between Pfizer-BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine and post-vaccination deaths within the country. However, the government has asked doctors to think about the general health of the most frail before giving them the vaccine.
According to public health authorities, Norway has registered 33 deaths among elderly people who have received their first dose till now, since the start of the country’s campaign at the end of December.
Of the 13 deaths that have been analysed in detail so far,” are the people of advanced age, have serious illnesses or are frail, or, all of them”, the director of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health Camilla Stoltenberg told reporters.
She added, “When it comes to causes of these deaths, there hasn’t been any analysis done yet.”
“It is important to remember that on an average about 45 people die every day at nursing homes in Norway, so it’s not given that this represents any excess mortality or that they are related to the vaccines,” she said.
Nevertheless, Norway has stressed that doctors should individually consider the patients who are frail or terminally ill, should receive the vaccine or not.
“It’s not impossible that some of those who have gotten the vaccine are so frail that maybe you should have reconsidered and not given them the vaccine, because they are so sick that they might have become worse from the normal side effects as the body reacts and builds up immunity,” Stoltenberg said.
Standard side effects from messenger RNA vaccines, like fever and nausea, “may have contributed to a fatal outcome in some frail patients,” said the Norwegian Medicines Agency last week.
Other neighboring countries of Norway and other number of countries like Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden have reported post-vaccination deaths but there is no direct links to the vaccine that have been established till now.
Pfizer and BioNTech told AFP on Monday they were “working with the Norwegian Medicines Agency to collect all the relevant information”.
They recalled that Norway’s vaccination campaign started with the elderly living in care homes, “most of whom are very elderly with underlying medical conditions and a few of which are terminally ill.”
About 48,000 people are vaccinated in Norway so far.
