A healthy 28-year-old man who died after being wrongly given the AstraZenecaCovid vaccine was told to ‘count yourself lucky’ when he was given it.
Alex Reid, an operations controller from Leeds, ‘did not understand why’ he was invited to get the vaccination early in March 2021 as a man in his late 20s who was otherwise healthy.
But he was given the AstraZeneca (AZ) vaccine just weeks before the government warned that people under the age of 30 should be given an alternative jab because the AZ shot was linked with an increased risk of blood clots.
Tragically, he died three months later. A coroner’s inquest has since concluded he was mistakenly invited forward for the inoculation because his GP records from 2004 – when he was just 11 – listed him as having a BMI of 68.97.
Now, it has been revealed that Mr Reid was told to count himself lucky when he queried why he was being invited for an early vaccine.
His mother, Halina Reid, told the BBC: ‘Surely this one call from Alex should have raised alarm bells since most of the calls the surgery was getting were from people asking why they had not been called.
‘The person who took the call said she did not know, made no attempt to find out and just said, ‘count yourself lucky’.’
She continued: ‘After Alex’s death, we knew something was not right – it has taken two years and five months to get answers.’
Coroner Oliver Longstaff has recommended adding ‘validation rules’ to GP record-keeping systems to stop ‘obviously erroneous’ information from being filed.
The error was caused by a clinician recording Mr Reid’s height at the age of 11 as being 145cm (4ft 9ins). His weight was then also entered as 145kg (319lbs).
The coroner ruled that if Mr Reid’s BMI had been recorded properly, he would not have been flagged for early immunisation and would not have been put forward for the vaccine before its risk factors for the under-30s were known.
He wrote: ‘When Alex was invited to receive his vaccination early, he did not understand why, and no one was able to tell him.
‘If the obviously erroneous BMI had not been recorded or had been challenged at the point of entry by the relevant IT system, Alex… would not have died when he did.’
The inquest heard that designing a system to flag such errors in BMI ‘would not have been feasible’ at the time of the pandemic.