The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) said that the results of its study into heart attacks in young individuals and a possible link between heart attacks and Covid-19 vaccines should be out in the next two weeks.
Rajiv Bahl, Director General of ICMR, told Moneycontrol that researchers conducting the study have shared a few preliminary findings and those will be made public very soon.
Bahl said that the ICMR is awaiting a peer review of the findings before making the assessment public. He added that the research institute was conducting four studies to study the sudden rise of heart attacks and their link with Covid-19 vaccination.
Four studies to assess vaccine link to deaths
The first study, according to Bahl, was focused on the reasons for the sudden deaths of young people, to study if they died of natural causes or otherwise.
“The autopsies are taking place at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi. The autopsy results are being reviewed to see if these deaths happened due to natural reasons or if there are other factors responsible,” he added.
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The ICMR DG said the second study was focused on assessing the sudden heart attack deaths from the angles of vaccination, long Covid and severity of the patient.
“The first review of the paper has come and we are answering some of the queries on it. As soon as the paper is peer-reviewed, we will release the findings,” he said.
In this study, people who got infected with Covid and were admitted to hospitals were followed up by the ICMR team for one year. The details were taken from the clinical registry of 40 hospitals.
According to the ICMR, 600 deaths were reported of 14,000 people, who went home after Covid-19 treatment.
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“Some of these deaths are natural deaths because they were old, they have comorbidities. There are three major factors that we are looking at other than co-morbidities. If a person, who died was vaccinated before hospital admission. What was the severity of the patient, and were there symptoms of long Covid after he was discharged? So, we are assessing the deaths from the angles of vaccination, long Covid, and severity of the patient,” Bahl explained.
The ICMR DG said the research paper with the findings has been accepted by the Indian Journal of Medical Research (IJMR) and an independent evaluation of the paper is currently taking place.
Explaining the study, the ICMR DG said that the people, who died are considered to be cases and those who survived are considered controls.
“If 600 people died out of 14,000, first we looked for the vaccination status. Out of these 600, how many received vaccines? And then we compare this data with the vaccinated pool of the rest who are alive,” he said.
The goal of this kind of study, also called an observational case-control study, was to know if more of those who died (600) were vaccinated than those in the control group (14,000) to ascertain if vaccination was a risk factor.
“If the numbers are equal, suppose if among 600 dead, 300 got vaccinated and in the pool of 14,000 people, 7,000 got vaccinated, then vaccines are not a risk factor,” he added.
The ICMR DG added that there was another study taking place on sudden deaths. “In this study, we have identified a significant number of people, who have died suddenly due to heart attack or brain stroke,” he added.
The fourth study focuses on people who suffered a myocardial infarction (heart attack) but didn’t die.
"Most of the deaths that we saw seem to be related to the heart or brain. In this study we are trying to see what were the risk factors that led to these thromboembolic events in people’s bodies,” he said.
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