Death after a vaccine shot

Soon India is going to vaccinate ONE CRORE of its Health workers. It will be immediately followed by 3 CRORE Front Line workers and 27 crore elderly peoples and citizens with other medical conditions.

That is a staggering 30 crores people getting injections over a period, say one year.

Then one elderly person in your mohalla who has taken the injection in the morning dies of heart attack in the evening.

It is going to happen in some places. And the vaccine is going to be blamed of course. Bad news spreads fast and spreads wide.

So I have assorted a couple of data here. Table 1 is a WHO Burden of Disease data for India. It says on an average 144 out of one million Indians are going to die from Heart attack for the year 2010. That calculates to a staggering 432000 deaths in 30 crore people.

432000 Indians would have ordinarily died even if they had not taken the vaccine. So how to explain to them that this particular death may not be related to the vaccination at all.

The incidence of death due to heart attack increases with age. We know that 82% heart attack occurs in people above 60 years. Here is another data from Pubmed, Indian authors. It estimates that if we take the data of all Indians above 70 years only, 1125000 Indians would succumb to heart attack in 2021. No wonder some of them may have taken the vaccine shot in the morning. A Coincidence.

If we take all Indians above 55, the figure increases to a staggering 1819,000 deaths. That is the age group we are targeting for vaccination. Here is another figure guessing the number of hospitalisations due to heart attack in 2021.

Srivastava A, Mohanty SK. Age and sex pattern of cardiovascular mortality, hospitalisation and associated cost in India. PLoS One. 2013 May 7;8(5):e62134. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0062134. PMID: 23667455; PMCID: PMC3646767.

Data source: PMC

There is immense opportunity for rumours to take off following any adverse effect after this mass immunisation program. It is the responsibility of each one of us to stop, think and rationalise before believing on any such news of adverse events following the ensuing vaccination.

Let sanity prevail.

But who can control the media ?