AUBURN (CBS13) – The Placer County Sheriff’s office announced Saturday that a person tested positive for the virus in late December and died just hours after receiving the vaccine on Thursday.
Now there are questions from the community about the safety of the vaccine. An Auburn woman says she witnessed the tragedy firsthand.
In a post on Facebook, she said she saw her grandfather, a 56-year-old man, receive the vaccine at a retirement home on Thursday.
Twenty minutes later he realized that his legs were tingling and he was short of breath. He was driven out by ambulance … 1 hour later he was in the ICU on a ventilator and three hours later he died, ”she wrote.
She goes on to say, “When I heard this, my family broke up [sic] heart, as he took care of my grandpa for years and helped when we came to say goodbye. “
Dr. Jeffrey Klausner, an infectious disease expert at UCLA, said no deaths have yet been associated with the vaccine. Klausner said people shouldn’t be so quick to blame until there are answers about a cause of death in this case.
He does say that if a person develops an allergic reaction within 15 minutes of receiving the injection, there is a possibility that the reaction could become fatal.
Meanwhile, the County Coroner is conducting an autopsy to determine the cause of death, and the sheriff’s office does not confirm the age, gender, where this happened, or what vaccine they received.
Dr. Klausner said there have been a few allergic reactions to the vaccine, including difficulty breathing or fainting, which can happen within 15 minutes of the dose being given. But he says the risk is low – about 1 in every 250,000 shots.
Multiple agencies are conducting research, including the California Department of Health.
Dr. Mark Ghaly, secretary of the California’s Health & Human Services Agency, acknowledged on Monday that they were conducting research, but also emphasized that people who received the Modern and Pfizer vaccines had mostly no significant response.
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