After sitting on the sidelines as the US and Europe plowed headlong into vaccinating against COVID-19, the part of the world that contained the virus most successfully is finally starting to administer shots.
Hong Kong began its program on Monday, with Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) getting Beijing-based Sinovac Biotech Ltd’s (科興生物) vaccine.
Japan, Australia and New Zealand have started vaccinating priority groups with shots from Pfizer Inc-BioNTech SE and AstraZeneca PLC.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Malaysia started its drive on Wednesday, while South Korea begins today and Thailand is preparing to start in a few days.
With COVID-19 mostly contained throughout much of Asia, governments have had the luxury to wait and see how safely and effectively these vaccines can blunt disease in other countries.
“Rather than say 20,000 in a trial, we now have 200 million vaccinated globally,” National University of Singapore infectious diseases professor Dale Fisher said. “I think this gives reluctant individuals a lot more confidence.”
The single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine is highly effective in preventing severe COVID-19, including newer variants, documents released on Wednesday by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showed.
The regulator is set to convene an independent panel today that would likely vote to authorize the vaccine, making it the third available in the US.
In large clinical trials, the J&J vaccine’s efficacy against severe disease was 85.9 percent in the US, 81.7 percent in South Africa and 87.6 percent in Brazil.
Overall, among 39,321 participants across all regions, the efficacy against severe COVID-19 was 85.4 percent, but it fell to 66.1 percent when including moderate forms of the disease.
Analyses of different demographic groups revealed no marked differences across age, race, or people with underlying conditions.
The vaccine was generally well-tolerated, with no reports of severe allergic reactions, which have been seen in rare cases for the Pfizer and Moderna shots.
Mild to moderate reactions, like injection-site pain, headache, fatigue and muscle pains were more likely to occur in younger participants than older.
There were no reported deaths in the vaccine group, but five in the placebo group.
“The analysis supported a favorable safety profile with no specific safety concerns identified that would preclude issuance of an EUA [emergency use authorization],” the FDA wrote.
The Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine proved 94 percent effective in a huge real world study published on Wednesday that involved 1.2 million people in Israel.
The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, also demonstrated that there is likely a strong protective benefit against infection, a crucial element in breaking onward transmission.
“This is the first peer-reviewed large scale evidence for the effectiveness of a vaccine in real world conditions,” said Ben Reis, a researcher at Harvard Medical School and one of the paper’s authors.
It involved almost 600,000 people who received the shots and an equal number who had not, but were closely matched to their vaccinated counterparts by age, sex, geographic, medical and other characteristics.
The efficacy against symptomatic COVID-19 was 94 percent seven or more days after the second dose — very close to the 95 percent achieved during phase 3 clinical trials.
Additional reporting by AFP
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