Why Covishield takers in India shouldn't worry
Often, these clots can travel to the heart and cause heart attacks or to the brain and cause a stroke. This seems to occur as a side-effect with most DNA vaccines, including Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine.Â
About 90 per cent of Indians vaccinated in the country against Covid-19 are estimated to have taken Covishield. Since reports about TTS have gone public, many doctors have been receiving SOS calls from people wanting to know how to safeguard themselves against a potential heart attack. There are also those who lost loved ones post-vaccination and are now correlating their deaths to Covishield and threatening to go to court to sue the manufacturers.
“I was threatened by a patient that I should have warned them of this rare side-effect and because of it they lost someone to a heart attack a year and a half after taking the vaccine,” says Dr Abhishek Mathur, a general physician in Noida Extension, Uttar Pradesh. “I tried to explain that side-effects don’t happen after such a long period of time but at the most within a day or two. But they wouldn’t listen. Other patients are terrified they are going to get sick soon.”
However, doctors and epidemiologists say a ‘rare’ side-effect is just thatârare. Indeed, only seven to eight individuals out of one million people who receive the vaccine are likely to develop TTS. This amounts to less than 1 person per 100,000 people. “Extremely few people are likely to develop this condition, and if it does happen then it is within the first month. Nobody who has taken it years ago needs to even think about getting side-effects now,” says Dr Anurag Agrawal, noted pulmonologist and dean of BioSciences and Health Research, Trivedi School of Biosciences, Ashoka University, Haryana.
On what might be the likely cause of heart attacks, Agrawal says, “Poor lifestyle would be one but also Covid itself has been proven to increase the risk of heart attacks. If you look at the data from before the vaccines were even rolled out, the number of heart attacks reported had already spiked. Even today, Covid continues to circulate, and between December and January, there was a spike in Covid infections in samples from Pune and Bengaluru.”
“People are just not getting tested for Covid. If anything, all properly conducted medical studies conclude that vaccines protect people from heart attacks, but they will not make people immune to them,” adds Dr Agrawal, who was formerly director of the Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, a CSIR (Council of Scientific & Industrial Research) institution.
This is not the first time that digital misinformation on vaccines has caused public panic. During the pandemic itself, fact-checkers had to work overtime to ensure reliable and verifiable facts on vaccine safety were available to the public. “There are a few reasons why people put out incorrect news. One, they don’t know any better. Most people don’t really understand where the science is wrong and they want to help others so they circulate it. Secondly, people like to circulate what they believe has worked for them or what aligns with their medical beliefs. And thirdlyâ this is the saddest reasonâsome like to intentionally sensationalise information to gain popularity online,” says Sudipto Sengupta, founder and CEO of the Healthy Indian project, part of the WHO (World Health Organization) vaccine safety net to provide reliable information on vaccines.
Serum Institute of India, the company which manufactures Covishield in India, has not yet commented on the news about TTS. But several leading doctors, including noted epidemiologist Raman Gangakhedkar, have gone on record to say that the benefits of Covid-19 vaccines are far greater than any side-effects. While the vaccine might impact one in 100,000 people, the Covid-19 disease was the second highest cause of death globally in 2021.Â
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