Coronavirus: no evidence Norway elderly deaths caused by Pfizer’s vaccine, WHO says

The UN health body said the risk-benefit balance of the vaccine ‘remains favourable in the elderly.’
Some very sick older people had died after getting the shot in Norway

Coronavirus pandemic

Bloomberg

Published: 8:33pm, 22 Jan 2021

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The World Health Organization said it sees no evidence that Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine contributed to the deaths of elderly people and urged that the shot still be used.

Reports of deaths “are in line with the expected, all-cause mortality rates and causes of death in the subpopulation of frail, elderly individuals, and the available information does not confirm a contributory role for the vaccine in the reported fatal events,” the WHO Global Advisory Committee on Vaccine Safety said in a statement on Friday.

The risk-benefit balance of the vaccine “remains favourable in the elderly.”

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The panel met on Tuesday to review reports that some very sick older people had died after getting the vaccine.

Initial cases reported last week in Norway had raised alarm, with authorities saying it was possible that vaccine side-effects could aggravate underlying illnesses even as they expected some nursing home residents to die soon after being vaccinated due to their frail underlying health.

Norway moved to calm that anxiety on Monday, with the Norwegian Medicines Agency saying that Covid-19 is more dangerous to most patients than vaccination.