Shivamogga, Telangana report deaths after Covid-19 jabs; no vaccine link, says govt

A 59-year-old orthopaedician in Shivamogga and a 42-year-old male healthcare worker in Telangana died on Wednesday, days after receiving Covid-19 vaccines. This takes the tally of such deaths to four though the Union Health Ministry categorically denied that these deaths were linked to the vaccines.

A top health official said three out of the four cases — deaths in Moradabad in UP and Ballari and Shivamogga in Karnataka — were not connected to the Covid shots they had received whereas post-mortem was being conducted on the Telangana person.

“Both are not linked to the vaccination. In the case of Ballari person, the post-mortem report was suggestive of myocardial infarction (heart attack). The death in Shivamogga is also a suspected case of myocardial infarction,” Manohar Agnani, Additional Secretary at the Health Ministry said here.

The orthopaedician in Shivamogga, Jayaprakash T V, was administered the vaccine on January 18 and died of cardiac arrest in a private hospital in the early hours of Wednesday. He worked at the Subbaiah Institute of Medical & Dental Sciences.

Medical director of the institute S Nagendra told DH that Jayaprakash had been working as a junior lecturer of orthopaedics at the institute for the past nine years.

He had conducted classes on January 18 and 19 after taking the vaccine. After he complained of chest pain on January 19, he was taken to Metro Hospital, where he died.

Experts said every death after vaccination need not be linked to the vaccine as there is an elaborate AEFI (adverse events following immunisation) mechanism to investigate such events.

They, however, admitted that information and public communication from the government on such a crucial aspect of mass vaccination was less than adequate.

“There is a background rate of death from different causes in a population. When a very large number of people are being tracked carefully over many days, as is being done in this campaign, the AEFI monitoring mechanism would pick up such deaths, if there is any,” explained Santanu Tripathi, a senior clinical pharmacologist in Kolkata.

In a statement, the Telangana Public Health and Family Welfare Department said the preliminary findings suggested the death of the health worker in Nirmal district in the state was not related to the vaccine. The district level AEFI committee is examining the matter, which in turn would report to the state-level panel for a review.

Till the fifth day of the vaccination, there were 82 AEFI cases of which 10 required hospitalisation. Of those 10, as many as seven have been discharged while the remaining three are under observation — one in Delhi, the second one in Karnataka (Chitradurga) and the third one in the Murshidabad district of West Bengal.

“... However, it must also be recognised that many adverse events are coincidental and not causal. Given the very large number of persons who have been vaccinated without any adverse effect, there is no reason for fearing the vaccines,” K Srinath Reddy, president, Public Health Foundation of India, told DH.