Tag: vaccine

Blood clots as prevalent with Pfizer and Moderna vaccine as with AstraZeneca’s: study

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/blood-clots-as-prevalent-with-pfizer-and-moderna-vaccine-as-with-astrazenecas-report-2021-04-15

Excerpt:

A study by Oxford University found the number of people who receive blood clots after getting vaccinated with a coronavirus vaccine are about the same for those who get Pfizer PFE, 2.43% and Moderna MRNA, 6.67% vaccines as they are for the AstraZeneca AZN, -0.16% vaccine that was produced with the university’s help. According to the study, 4 in 1 million people experience cerebral venous thrombosis after getting the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine, versus 5 in 1 million people for the AstraZeneca vaccine. The risk of getting CVT is much higher for those who get COVID-19 — 39 in a million patients — than it is for those who get vaccinated. AstraZeneca’s vaccine use has been halted or limited in many countries on blood clot concerns.

Author(s): Steve Goldstein

Publication Date: 15 April 2021

Publication Site: Marketwatch

U.S. Calls for Pause on Johnson & Johnson Vaccine After Clotting Cases

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/us/politics/johnson-johnson-vaccine-blood-clots-fda-cdc.html

Excerpt:

Federal health agencies on Tuesday called for an immediate pause in use of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine after six recipients in the United States developed a rare disorder involving blood clots within about two weeks of vaccination.

All six recipients were women between the ages of 18 and 48. One woman died and a second woman in Nebraska has been hospitalized in critical condition.

Nearly seven million people in the United States have received Johnson & Johnson shots so far, and roughly nine million more doses have been shipped out to the states, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Author(s): Noah Weiland, Sharon LaFraniere, Carl Zimmer

Publication Date: 13 April 2021

Publication Site: New York Times

China admits its vaccines aren’t very good

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/11/china-covid-vaccines-480802

Excerpt:

In a rare admission of the weakness of Chinese coronavirus vaccines, the country’s top disease control official says their effectiveness is low and the government is considering mixing them to get a boost.

Chinese vaccines “don’t have very high protection rates,” said the director of the China Centers for Disease Control, Gao Fu, at a conference Saturday in the southwestern city of Chengdu.

Author(s): Associated Press

Publication Date: 11 April 2021

Publication Site: Politico

Oxford Pauses Dosing in Trial of AstraZeneca Covid-19 Vaccine in Children, Teenagers

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/oxford-pauses-dosing-in-trial-of-astrazeneca-covid-19-vaccine-in-children-teenagers-11617729303

Excerpt:

The University of Oxford said it has paused administering doses of the Covid-19 vaccine it developed with AstraZeneca PLC in a small U.K. study to test the shot in children and teenagers, pending further information about rare blood-clotting issues in adults who have received it.

The Oxford-led pediatric trial started in mid-February and is aimed at testing the vaccine in more than 200 young people aged 6 to 17 years. An Oxford spokesman said Tuesday that no safety issues have arisen in the trial itself, but broader concerns about rare clotting problems in adults have triggered further regulatory reviews in the U.K. and Europe to investigate any potential link with the vaccine.

Oxford is waiting for more information from the U.K.’s drugs watchdog, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, before giving any further vaccinations to children or teenagers in the pediatric trial, the spokesman said.

The pause is the latest setback for the Oxford-AstraZeneca shot, which has faced questions about its efficacy and potential side effects even as tens of millions of doses have been administered following safety signoffs in more than 70 countries.

Author(s): Jenny Strasburg, Eric Sylvers

Publication Date: 6 April 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Gov. Ned Lamont says Connecticut’s age-based COVID vaccine rollout is saving more lives — But is it?

Mary Pat Campbell
Gov. Ned Lamont says Connecticut’s age-based COVID vaccine rollout is saving more lives — But is it?

Excerpt:

Connecticut’s neighbors have also prioritized age in their rollouts after prioritizing health care workers and nursing homes, though they have also made teachers, essential workers and people with underlying conditions eligible in tandem at different points in the pandemic. New York announced that teachers and some essential workers were eligible in January along with individuals 75+; Massachusetts included people with co-morbidities in its 65+ rollout in late February. Rhode Island deviated from an age-based strategy around mid-March when it opened up eligibility to teachers, and later to individuals with co-morbidities.

Prioritizing based on age is not a novel approach, said Omer, arguing that what’s really under debate is the decision to continue to do so for people younger than 65. Omer has previously criticized the state’s age-based rollout for de-emphasizing underlying conditions, though he has since described the state’s plan to prioritize individuals with co-morbidities after opening eligibility to all individuals 16+ as a “reasonable middle ground, depending on how it’s implemented.”

Author(s): KASTURI PANANJADY

Publication Date: 2 April 2021

Publication Site: CT Mirror

AstraZeneca Releases Updated Covid-19 Vaccine Data Showing 76% Efficacy

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/astrazeneca-releases-more-data-on-its-covid-19-vaccine-11616637984

Excerpt:

Aside from finding the vaccine 79% effective, the preliminary results indicated the vaccine was even more effective in study subjects ages 65 years and older, and the shot was safe.

The late-stage, or Phase 3, trial had 32,449 subjects in the U.S., Peru and Chile. About 20% of them were 65 years or older.

The fuller data showed the vaccine to be 85% effective in the older age group. Older adults are considered more vulnerable to serious Covid-19, making them a high-priority group in vaccinations globally.

Though AstraZeneca’s latest release involved more cases, the company’s analysis might still be incomplete. AstraZeneca said it was reviewing an additional 14 cases to see if they should be added to the final tally.

Author(s): Jenny Strasburg, Joseph Walker

Publication Date: 24 March 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Vaccines are making some long Covid sufferers feel better

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/covid-19-long-haulers-vaccine?mc_cid=4922be2694&mc_eid=983bcf5922

Excerpt:

Brown’s story isn’t unusual. Around the world, many members of the long Covid community are reporting a remarkable improvement after receiving the vaccine. Although there is no definitive data on how many are experiencing this, informal surveys report up to 30 per cent of long-haulers whose symptoms have improved following vaccination. The majority report feeling the same, with fewer reporting a worsening of symptoms after receiving the vaccine.

Many long-haulers had initially expressed apprehension about the vaccine, for fear it would exacerbate their condition. But the opposite appears to be the case for some. Figuring out why could be the key to finally understanding what causes the mysterious ailment, once and for all.

Author(s): Grace Browne

Publication Date: 25 March 2021

Publication Site: Wired UK

Moderna Is Testing Its Covid-19 Vaccine on Young Children

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/moderna-is-testing-its-covid-19-vaccine-on-young-children-11615892416

Excerpt:

Moderna Inc. has begun studying its Covid-19 vaccine in children aged 6 months to 11 years in the U.S. and Canada, the latest effort to widen the mass-vaccination campaign beyond adults.

The Cambridge, Mass., company said Tuesday that the first children have received doses in the study, which Moderna is conducting in collaboration with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a division of the Department of Health and Human Services.

“This pediatric study will help us assess the potential safety and immunogenicity of our COVID-19 vaccine candidate in this important younger age population,” Moderna Chief Executive Stéphane Bancel said.

Author(s): Peter Loftus

Publication Date: 16 March 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Huge vaccine error: 9,000 patients were forgotten

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://stiften.dk/artikel/k%C3%A6mpe-vaccinefejl-9-000-patienter-blev-glemt

Excerpt (via Google Translate):

Jørgen Schøler Kristensen, Medical Director at Aarhus University Hospital, explains the error as follows:

– When patients with a civil registration number beginning with 0 had to be entered, the civil registration number was declared invalid if a hyphen was missing. So 26 percent of the civil registration numbers we have reported have not been entered correctly, so they have not received the invitation in their e-box to be vaccinated as they should have had, says Jørgen Schøler Kristensen.

Patients born the first nine days of any month and having been unlucky with a hyphen were forgotten.

Additional:

Author(s): Jens Christian Thaysen

Publication Date: 19 March 2021

Publication Site: Århus Stiftstidende

Drop in South Africa Cases Fuels Queries — Steep decline remains a mystery in country that hasn’t ramped up vaccines or lockdowns

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/south-africas-drop-in-covid-19-cases-adds-to-questions-about-waves-of-infections-11615734003

Excerpt:

Since mid-January, confirmed Covid-19 infections in South Africa have fallen from a record of nearly 22,000 a day to around 1,000, without a large-scale vaccination campaign or stringent lockdown. Fewer than 5% of Covid-19 tests are finding traces of the virus, a sign health agencies are missing fewer cases. The government has lifted most remaining restrictions for the country of 60 million people.

The cause of this steep decline in cases remains somewhat of a mystery. As in other countries that have at some point experienced surprising drops in Covid-19 cases — such as India, Pakistan and some parts of Brazil — epidemiologists and virologists are piecing together different explanations for why the outbreak in South Africa isn’t following patterns set elsewhere.

Those include important population groups reaching sufficient levels of immunity to slow transmission, people sticking more closely to social-distancing rules, such as wearing masks and voluntarily reducing contacts, when deaths were mounting before the decline.

Author(s): Gabriele Steinhauser

Publication Date: 14 March 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

Pausing AstraZeneca COVID-19 Shots Is a Bad Risk/Benefit Call

Mary Pat Campbell
Pausing AstraZeneca COVID-19 Shots Is a Bad Risk/Benefit Call

Excerpt:

Last week Austria, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland all suspended the administration of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine, citing reports of blood clots occurring in a few folks who had been inoculated with it. Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Thailand, and the Netherlands have now joined them.

“There is no causal effect established or anything like that yet,” Irish Prime Minister Micheal Martin told CNBC, “but as a precautionary move in line with the precautionary principle and in an abundance of caution, our clinical advice was to pause the program whilst the EMA does a review of this.”

The precautionary principle is an ideological construct that eschews risk-benefit evaluations and essentially requires that all new technologies be somehow proved entirely risk-free before they can be used.

Author(s): Ronald Bailey

Publication Date: 15 March 2021

Publication Site: Reason

Nudge Off: The pandemic has exposed the flaws in the belief that people need to be manipulated into making smarter choices.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.city-journal.org/pandemic-has-undermined-our-sense-of-risk

Excerpt:

Perhaps most damaging, however, has been the idea arising in the last few years that people simply can’t be trusted to make sensible risk assessments—that they must be guided or even manipulated into making smarter choices. The idea that we need to be “tricked” into good behavior was pervasive throughout the pandemic. First, we were told masks weren’t effective, in what turned out to be an attempt to protect supplies for health-care workers. Last spring, we were told that coming into contact with others in just about any environment was unsafe, despite data showing the risk of outdoor transmission was very low. Over the holidays, rather than telling people that they should reduce their risks at holiday gatherings by taking steps like getting a test beforehand, public-health officials said that we should all just stay home, because tests can’t guarantee safety. Even today, the FDA refuses to approve cheap, at-home rapid tests without a prescription because the government doesn’t trust individuals to assess risks based on good, albeit imperfect, information.

The worst, most consequential failure in risk communication concerns the current vaccine rollout. The media constantly instruct us that, even weeks after receiving the second shot, it’s still not safe to socialize without masks. President Biden and Anthony Fauci have warned that we may not be able to resume “normal” life for another year. Fauci recently counseled against vaccinated people eating in indoor restaurants or playing mahjong together. Public-health officials today gave the green light for vaccinated people to gather together—but only after weeks of confusing and contradictory guidance.

Author(s): Allison Schrager

Publication Date: 8 March 2021

Publication Site: City Journal