KUALA LUMPUR, Feb 24 – The 13-year-old boy who died 18 days after Covid-19 vaccination did not report any side effects from the vaccine, Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said today.
The Health director-general said the teenager was brought to a public health clinic, and then to a hospital, 18 days after he received his first coronavirus vaccine dose. The 13-year-old subsequently died that day.
“After he received his jab, no allergies, side effects, or AEFI (adverse events following immunisation) were reported to NPRA (National Pharmaceutical Regulatory Agency),” Dr Noor Hisham said at a joint press conference with Health Minister Khairy Jamaluddin today.
“We’re still awaiting the results of the post-mortem and results from the lab investigation on whether this death was caused by other viruses.
“In any case, we received a report that this death was not linked to allergies; there was no allergy report from the lab. The Ministry of Health (MOH) has not yet received the full post-mortem or lab report.”
Klang MP Charles Santiago highlighted last Monday a viral video in Tamil by the ethnic Indian teenager’s parents, who tearfully urged people to reconsider vaccinating their child as they linked their son’s death to the Covid-19 vaccine.
The DAP lawmaker urged Khairy to publish the boy’s forensic report and to give an estimate on when the report would be completed.
Charles told CodeBlue earlier today that 16-day prayers for the boy were held on January 30, which means that the latter died on January 15 or 16.
At his press conference today, Khairy said although MOH sympathises with every reported death following Covid-19 vaccination, the ministry relies on clinical investigations to determine the cause of death.
He pointed out that on average, Malaysia reports 90 to 120 stroke cases a day.
“So in the situation when we give vaccines to many people, there will be stroke cases that have nothing to do with vaccination because that is our baseline,” Khairy said.
“Hence, we must conduct an investigation. We cannot simply say that just because one got a stroke after vaccination that the vaccine caused the stroke.”
Khairy also said that from the 1,758 reports of serious AEFI received by the NPRA on the Covid-19 vaccination programme as of February 18, a total of 595 reports were suspected AEFI death cases.
The Covid-19 Vaccine Special Pharmacovigilance Committee (JFK), which includes experts from universities besides MOH, found no causal association between death and vaccination in 443 suspected AEFI death cases.
Another 152 reports are pending for complete investigation.
