As updated COVID-19 vaccines are rolled out across the country, fresh evidence confirms that the vaccines are overwhelmingly safe, with only a small percentage of people reporting serious reactions.vaccine doses have been administered in Ontario alone as of Oct. 8, with 23,002 reports of adverse reactions, an incidence of 0.06 per cent, according to a report from Public Health Ontario.
Just 5.5 per cent of adverse events linked to the vaccines were considered serious and included conditions that required an admission to hospital or resulted in death.But Public Health Ontario says that doesn’t mean the vaccines were the cause. The surveillance program captures all medical events that occur after vaccination, so those that would have happened anyway are included in the report, even if there’s a small likelihood of a link.
Similar data published by British Columbia earlier this year also confirms the strong safety profile of COVID-19 vaccines. There, the vast majority of reported adverse events were allergic reactions or pain at the injection site, with about 8 per cent of events considered serious. At the same time, a new study published by Canadian researchers found that babies whose mothers had been vaccinated against COVID-19 during pregnancy were less likely to experience serious health complications, be admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit or die. The study, published this week in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, looked at data from more than 142,000 births in Ontario and followed infants for six months to determine their outcomes.