Dr. Erik Christensen, Utah’s chief Medical Examiner, said proving vaccine injury as a cause of death almost never happens. “Did the vaccine cause this? I think that would be very hard to demonstrate in autopsy,” he said.
Erik can think of only one instance where you would see a vaccine as the cause of death on an official autopsy report and that would be in an immediate case of Anaphylaxis. One where a person received the vaccine and died almost instantaneously. “Short of that” he said, “it would be difficult for us to definitively say this is the vaccine.” A more likely result, would be a lack of answers or an “incomplete autopsy.”
The autopsy, he said, can provide answers to a family when no disease or red flags are found. As Erik explained, “that we don’t see a competing cause of death.” That lack of answers may help them understand if the vaccine was a possible cause.
Deaths are always investigated and those investigations are important. If a death is causally link to one of the vaccines, it will be important to understand exactly why that person reacted in that way so we can protect others (either getting them a different vaccine or possibly no vaccine if there’s some intrinsic issue, at which point they’ll have to rely on herd immunity to protect them).
It’s not the vaccines couldn’t cause a severe reaction (and they have, about 1 in 90,000 for the Pfizer vaccine and about 1 in 400,000 for the Moderna vaccine), or even possibly death. It’s that the reactions that have been observed have been quickly and easily resolved (typically with epinephrine) and every case thus far where someone died at some point after receiving one of the vaccines was found upon investigation to be unrelated.
The case with the woman in Utah is currently being investigated. There are 1,000 possibilities about what happened in her case and it would be irresponsible to speculate about what caused her death.