News channel gaffe declared the 16th century playwright William Shakespeare had died 5 months after getting the COVID-19 vaccine

• An Argentinian TV news channel mistakenly reported playwright William Shakespeare's death on Thursday.
• A newsreader confused him with Bill Shakespeare, who died five months after getting a COVID-19 jab.
• Bill Shakespeare, 81, was the second person to get the vaccine and died of an unrelated illness.

An Argentinian TV news channel accidentally reported the death of 16th-century playwright William Shakespeare earlier this week and said that it had happened five months after he received his COVID-19 vaccine.

In a clip that aired on Thursday night, Canal 26 newsreader Noelia Novilla said that Shakespeare, "one of the most important writers in the English language," had died of a stroke unrelated to the vaccine, The Guardian reports.

Novilla had confused this with the death of his namesake, 81-year-old Englishman William Shakespeare, who went by the name Bill.

She made the blunder during the 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. slot on Canal 26, a pay-TV news channel in Argentina.

"As we all know, he's one of the most important writers in the English language - for me the master. Here he is. He was the first man to get the coronavirus vaccine. He's died in England at the age of 81," Novilla said.

Bill made headlines in December 2020 for becoming the second person in the world to get the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine outside of a clinical trial, as previously reported by Insider.

-Fato Gloro (@cruziisimo) May 28, 2021

Margaret Keenan, a 90-year-old grandmother, was the first person in the world to receive it. Both received the jab at University Hospital in Coventry, Warwickshire.

"Over the past few hours, as I'm sure you will have seen, a report has gone viral. I actually knew what I was saying to people, just like I always do," Novilla said on Friday, as reported by The Guardian.

"I expressed myself badly; I missed out a full stop, a comma, some brackets. I wanted to clear up something that was very unclear and of course, people misinterpreted it," she added.

Following Bill's death, his friend Coventry councilor Jayne Innes said the "best tribute to Bill is to have the jab," according to the BBC.

Playwright William Shakespeare, who is also from Warwickshire in England, died over 400 years ago in 1616 and is buried in his birthplace of Stratford upon Avon.