The Covid-19 vaccines India is using are absolutely safe, top health officials have iterated, while also asserting that health authorities are adequately investigating all deaths among people who have been inoculated.

The officials said the low rates of adverse events following immunisation (AEFIs) and investigations so far have strengthened the evidence for the safety of the vaccines even as the campaign to vaccinate 9.6 million healthcare workers approaches midpoint.

A digital system designed to track all AEFIs has so far documented 8,563 AEFIs among over 4.3 million healthcare workers vaccinated, a rate of 0.18 per cent, health secretary Rajesh Bhushan said.

“So far, we’ve had 34 cases of hospitalisation which is .0007 per cent of the people immunised,” Bhushan said. There have been 19 deaths of vaccinated people which, he said, have been investigated.

When a vaccinated person dies, a board of three doctors conducts a post-mortem at the site and the state AEFI committee looks at whether vaccination could have been the cause of death. A national AEFI committee looks at all the deaths nationwide to make its own independent assessment, Bhushan said.

“Those who say local governments or state governments or the central government have rushed to certify that there is no causality is an absolute baseless narrative,” Bhushan said. Once the national AEFI panel has conducted its assessment, the findings will be placed in the public domain, he said.

Health officials said the AEFI data show that only a very small proportion of recipients have experienced minimal side effects, pointing out that a robust AEFI tracking mechanism is designed to document even mild effects such as pain at the site of the injection.

No death has been linked to the vaccine, said Vinod Paul, the chair of the national expert group on vaccine administration and member of Niti Aayog. “It is absolutely clear from the available data that the vaccines are superbly safe.”

The assurances from the health officials come days after a group of 12 doctors and public health researchers asked the health ministry to make public details of investigations on each of the deaths among vaccine recipients.

Experts familiar with the AEFI assessment process say natural deaths occur every day across the country and the rigorous AEFI tracking mechanisms that have been set up alongside the campaign are designed to record all deaths among vaccine recipients.

The current campaign is relying on two vaccines — Covishield, the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine produced in India by the Serum Institute of India, Pune, and Covaxin, a homegrown vaccine jointly developed by Bharat Biotech, Hyderabad, and the Indian Council of Medical Research.