“There is no documented death that’s been linked to a COVID vaccine,” Soumya Swaminathan, a WHO clinical scientist, said in a March 15 news conference.
“While we need to continue to be very closely monitoring this, we do not want people to panic.”
The U.N.-backed health agency would “for the time being recommend that countries continue vaccinating with AstraZeneca,” the scientist said, adding that more updates are pending on March 18.
Her statements follow those made by the EU’s European Medicines Agency that the vaccine is safe, saying that “the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in preventing COVID-19, with its associated risk of hospitalization and death, outweigh the risks of side effects.”
Teresa Angela Camelio, the Piedmont prosecutor, announced that the move “[follows] the decision of the Piedmont region to suspend ‘momentarily’ the administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine included in batch ABV5811, pending the decisions of the judicial authority and the drug supervisory commission.”
Tognatti received the COVID-19 vaccine in his hometown of Biella on March 13. His wife told news outlets that he went to bed that night with a high fever. The next day, she said, an ambulance was called for him, and he later died.
In a statement to The Epoch Times, AstraZeneca stated that “around 17 million people in the EU and UK have now received our vaccine, and the number of cases of blood clots reported in this group is lower than the hundreds of cases that would be expected among the general population.”
The Italian man’s death came just days after a 60-year-old Danish woman suffered highly “unusual symptoms” and died after receiving the vaccine, the Danish Medicines Agency reported. The woman had a low number of blood platelets and clots in small and large vessels, as well as bleeding, it stated, according to a report from Reuters.
“It was an unusual course of illness around the death that made the Danish Medicines Agency react,” the agency said in a statement.
