ONE of Jamaica’s top medical professionals, Dr Guyan Arscott is recommending that the Government indicates, in its daily COVID-19 reports, whether the people who died from the novel coronavirus were vaccinated or unvaccinated.

“Every day they put out the number of deaths. If you have people out there saying that the vaccine is killing people, the least the Government can do is publish those who were unvaccinated and vaccinated, or if none of them were vaccinated. Tell them! Death is what counts and death is what we cannot hide,” Dr Arscott told the Jamaica Observer yesterday.

In a statement on Saturday, the Ministry of Health and Wellness said that in the six months since the island has been administering vaccines there have been no deaths due to vaccinations against COVID-19 in Jamaica.

The ministry also dismissed reports elsewhere that deaths had occurred due to individuals being vaccinated.

It issued a statement pointing to a report by Dr Melody Ennis, director of family health services, at the Ministry of Health and Wellness’s COVID Conversations and press conference on September 30, saying that 11 people died after being vaccinated.

“However, nine of those cases were found to be due to other causes, making their vaccination coincidental. The other two deaths have been classified as indeterminate temporal, which means that while they occurred after the persons were vaccinated, there is no established link to their vaccination,” the statement continued.

Dr Arscott explained that if there were detailed reports of the deaths there would be less misinformation shared in the society, especially about deaths mostly being linked to the uptake of the vaccines.

“The only thing we can be certain about is those who have died. If there are those who have died and they are not vaccinated, we need to know so that it carries a little more weight. The people on the streets are telling me that the vaccines are killing people. That’s because they don’t know; there are a lot of misconceptions. We have a lot of work to do because the people are not educated,” he said.

In the 24 hours leading up to Sunday, the country had recorded 213 new COVID-19 cases and 13 deaths, bringing the country’s total confirmed cases to 84,914 since March last year. Of that number, 53,404 have recovered. A total of 1,922 people have died.