Was Hungarian television star István Vágó killed by an adverse reaction to Pfizer-BioNTech's COVID-19 vaccine? No, there is no evidence to support this claim: Vágó's widow told Hungarian media that he died from an aortic rupture. While doctors say mRNA jabs such as Pfizer's may be linked to cardiac complications in rare cases, there is no proof that Vágó's condition was vaccine-related.
The claim appeared in a Hungarian-language video on TikTok on May 3, 2023, under the caption, "Wake Up Call!!!" The speaker says:
They say István Vágó's case was unexpected. Well, children, there was nothing unexpected after three Pfizer vaccinations. Nothing surprising. So, my condolences to the family. See you later. (All translations by Lead Stories.)
This is how the video looked at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Wed Jun 21 12:12:29 2023 UTC)
Vágó, who was perhaps best known as host of the Hungarian version of TV quiz show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? from 2000 to 2008, died on April 29, 2023, at age 74. In an interview published in Hungarian women's magazine Kiskegyed on May 16, 2023, Vágó's widow, Judit, described his passing as follows:
He was still on the internet at home at ten o'clock in the evening, corresponding with his acquaintances and friends on Facebook. Then he just said he was in pain and suddenly collapsed...
He had an abdominal aortic rupture, and even the paramedics who arrived couldn't help him. Now I only regret that I didn't take him for an abdominal ultrasound, but his stomach never hurt and I never thought of anything like that. And by the way, our doctor friends say: Even if that had happened, it's not certain that they would have seen anything -- indeed, even if he'd been lying on the operating table, they wouldn't have been able to save him.
The aorta is the artery that delivers blood from the heart to the rest of the body. In the interview, Judit Vágó said her husband had been for a cardiological exam in the weeks before his death and that doctors had found nothing amiss. She also said nothing about any vaccine weaking her husband's aorta.
COVID-19 vaccines that use messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA), such as those produced by Pfizer, are associated with an elevated risk of myocarditis, an inflammation of the heart muscle, and pericarditis, an irritation of the tissue that envelops the heart, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Such incidents are rare, usually occur within several days of vaccination, and most commonly affect adolescents and young adult males, the CDC says.
Researchers have hypothesized that mRNA vaccines may be linked to aortic dissection, a tear in the walls of the artery. In a paper published in Legal Medicine in November 2022, doctors in Japan examined the case of a man in his 90s who had died of a dissected aorta two weeks after receiving his third dose of an mRNA vaccine for COVID-19. The authors suspected that pericarditis, which may have been a side effect of vaccination, had weakened the artery.
However, other scientists criticized the Japanese study for failing to establish whether the man had been infected with COVID-19 at the time of his death. In a letter to Legal Medicine's editor dated November 28, 2022, Josef Finsterer, a neurologist based in Vienna, Austria, wrote:
There is...evidence for a causal relationship between SARS-CoV-2 infection and aortic dissection... As long as an acute SARS-CoV-2 infection has not been ruled out, a causal relation between vaccination and pericarditis cannot be established. A further argument against vaccination as the cause of pericarditis is that the patient had two vaccine doses before without obvious side effects.
The CDC stressed that "Heart problems are 5 times more likely after COVID-19 illness than after COVID-19 vaccination" in a post to its Twitter account on February 6, 2023.
Additional Lead Stories fact checks of claims about COVID-19 vaccination can be found here.
