As COVID-19 vaccinations continue to roll out across Singapore, one woman is searching hard for a straight answer from authorities about her mother’s death just roughly eight hours after the 64-year-old received her first Pfizer-BioNTech/Comirnaty jab.
On Saturday (31 July), Charlene Yong took to Facebook to detail how six days earlier at 10.05am, her mother had received her first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech/Comirnaty. Tragically, about eight hours after the jab, Ms Yong’s mother collapsed at home while cleaning the floor.
This is reminiscent of a similar incident earlier in June shared by Andrew Tan, co-founder and CEO of Singapore’s first home-grown diaper brand Pee-Ka-Poo, who claimed that his mother passed away “suddenly” just 29 hours after taking her first dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine.
In her post, Ms Yong noted that her mother had led an “active lifestyle and is mostly healthy except for controlled hypertension and mild diabetes”.
“What could have happened during the course of the vaccination that robbed her of her life?” she asked.
“Or was it just pure coincidence that she has to return to Jesus on the day where she received her first dose of vaccination?”
Stating that she “used to be” an advocate for the COVID-19 vaccination and that she was “largely convinced” by the authorities’ claim over its safety, Ms Yong explained that she used to speak positively about the benefits of vaccination and had even “debunked” speculations about it being unsafe.
Looking for closure, she went on to say: “And hopefully with the coroner’s report, we can better understand the true cause of death than just ‘hypertensive and coronary artery disease’.”
Besides that, Ms Yong also touched on the difficulty of getting hold of the coroner’s report in the first place.
“Why is it that we have to plough so hard with the authorities to have the coroner report to be released to us?” she questioned.
Ms Yong explained that if her mother’s death was really related to the COVID-19 vaccination, the family would like to help increase awareness to the public on the “cross interactions of the vaccinations with [her] mother’s medication for hypertension”.
Another notion they wish to highlight is whether or not mopping the floor should be discouraged for elderly folks right after they had received the inoculation, she added.
Finally, if her mother’s death really was linked to the vaccine, Ms Yong questioned the adequacy of screening done at vaccination centres for elderly folks with medical conditions similar to her late mother before approving them for vaccination.
She concluded her post saying, “As much as we want to control and contain COVID-19, it is too big a price to pay to have my mother sacrificed because we trusted the system that the vaccination is safe and screening for the vaccination was done properly.”
