JERUSALEM, Jan 19 (Reuters) – Israel has not identified any evidence linking strokes to an updated coronavirus vaccine made by U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech SE, according to a Health Ministry official.
On Friday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said a safety surveillance system indicated the vaccine could be linked to a type of stroke. brain in older adults, according to preliminary data.
“We have not found anything like it, even after rechecking all our data after the FDA announcement,” Salman Zarka, head of Israel’s coronavirus task force, told a video briefing sent to Reuters on Thursday. .
Some 389,648 people in Israel have so far been vaccinated against the parent strain and its BA.4/BA.5 omicron subvariant.
On Wednesday, the European Union’s drug regulator also said it had found no safety warnings in the region regarding the bivalent vaccine.
Pfizer and BioNTech said in a statement Friday that they were aware of limited reports of ischemic strokes in people 65 and older following administration of their updated vaccine.
Pfizer further noted that neither the companies nor the CDC or FDA had seen similar findings in other surveillance systems and said there was no evidence to suggest an association with the companies’ use of the COVID-19 vaccines. (Reporting by Maayan Lubell; edited in Spanish by Carlos Serrano)
