Per Praveen Menon | Reuters
WELLINGTON – New Zealand reported its first recorded death related to the Pfizer / BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine, the health ministry said Monday after a woman suffered a rare side effect of heart muscle inflammation.
The report comes as the country struggles with an outbreak of the Delta variant of the coronavirus after nearly six months of being virus-free. This was followed by a review by an independent group that oversaw the safety of vaccines.
“This is the first case in New Zealand in which a death has been linked in the days following vaccination to the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine,” the ministry said in a statement, without giving the woman’s age.
The vaccine control group attributed the death to myocarditis, a rare but well-known side effect of the Pfizer vaccine, the ministry added.
The board said myocarditis “was probably due to vaccination,” according to the ministry. The health ministry said other medical problems at the same time could have influenced the outcome after the vaccination.
Myocarditis is an inflammation of the heart muscle that can limit the organ’s ability to pump blood and cause changes in heartbeat rates.
Pfizer said it acknowledged that there could be rare reports of myocarditis after vaccines, but these side effects were extremely rare.
“Pfizer takes very seriously the adverse events that are potentially associated with our vaccine,” the company said.
“The benefits of vaccination with the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine continue to far outweigh the risk of COVID-19 infection and vaccine side effects, including myocarditis,” Pfizer said.
Regulators in the United States, the European Union and the World Health Organization have said that Pfizer’s mRNA vaccines with German partner BioNTech and Moderna are associated with rare cases of myocarditis or pericarditis, an inflammation of the lining. around the heart, but that the benefits of shooting outweigh the risks.
Cases, which mainly affect younger men, are usually mild and treatable, but can lead to serious illness and hospitalization.
No deaths have been reported in the United States for young adults who developed myocarditis after receiving mRNA vaccines, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said Monday.
Aside from that, he also said that a total of 2,574 cases of myocarditis or pericarditis had been reported in the US. More than 330 million doses of Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna vaccines have been administered in the United States.
The risk of myocarditis was 18.5 per million doses given to people aged 18 to 24 years after the second dose of Pfizer and 20.2 per million for this age group among the recipients of the second dose. of Modern. According to the CDC’s analysis based on its national reporting system, the risk decreases with age.
The EU drug regulator said on July 9 that five people had died due to the side effect of the heart after receiving either of the two mRNA vaccines in the European Economic Area, all of them elderly or with other diseases. More than 200 million doses of mRNA have been administered in the region.
New Zealand has provisionally approved the use of the Pfizer / BioNTech, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines, but only the Pfizer vaccine has been approved for public release. To date, more than 3 million doses have been administered, mainly to people over 50 years of age.
New Zealand reported 53 new cases of COVID-19 on Monday, bringing its infection count to 562 in the current outbreak, amid a national shutdown applied this month to limit the spread of the Delta variant.