DENVER (KDVR) — A new report in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System said that a 15-year-old boy from Colorado died from cardiac failure April 20, two days after receiving the Pfizer COVID vaccine.
There are no pre-existing conditions or allergies listed. Anyone can make a report to VAERS and the reports are not verified.
Right now Pfizer only has emergency use authorization for people age 16 and up. FOX31 has contacted the CDC and Colorado Department of Public Heath and Environment to try and verify this report. Both agencies said no other information about the specific case could be provided.
But in February Tom Shimabukuro, the deputy director of the immunization safety office at the CDC, spoke with our station and explained how VAERS works.
“We depend on health care providers, and patients, and parents, and care givers, and others to send reports of adverse events following immunization to CDC, to our VAERS system,” he said in February.
If the report is classified as serious, the CDC follows up to get medical records. “Some of these reports might be true adverse reactions that are caused by the vaccine, and some of these reports are coincidental health events and not related to the vaccine at all,” he explained.
Severe reactions, he said, are extremely rare. “The benefits of vaccination far outweigh any risks of vaccination,” he said.
On Monday the CDPHE said the CDC is leading the investigation in this recent case.
The agency gave a statement that read in part, “Given the large number of COVID-19 vaccinations currently underway, it is expected that events such as heart attacks, strokes, serious illnesses and death will, by chance alone, occur in the days following vaccination. To date, VAERS has not detected patterns in cause of death that would indicate a safety problem with COVID-19 vaccines.”