This Wednesday the emergency use of the CanSino COVID-19 vaccine that requires only one dose. In this regard, director of the Institute of Public Health (ISP), Heriberto García, indicated in CNN Chile that this process was carried out with 10 votes in favor, 2 against and one abstention.
Regarding the votes against, these “have to do with the need to demonstrate a longer time of immunogenicity of the vaccine, because basically this The vaccine lasts for approximately 5 months.“, he pointed. And he added that its limited use in adults up to 60 years of age, is due to the fact that “the clinical studies that were presented agreed on direct antecedents that showed the difference between age groups” in terms of its efficacy.
On this last point, García stressed that “the study was carried out with 54 thousand people in various countries, and of those, 17 thousand and a fraction were vaccinated with one dose. And it was shown that day 28 after the first dose, they were 65% effective in avoiding illness. That is, they probably had positive cases, but those cases did not suffer from disease ”and remained asymptomatic.
Read also: ISP approved CanSino vaccine against COVID-19: It is the first of a single dose in Chile
Variants
Regarding its effectiveness in the variants of COVID-19, the director of the ISP clarified that “this (CanSino) and all the other vaccines, are measured in general with what is happening at the moment in which the study is carried out, with the variants that are in that moment ”.
Therefore, that 65% would also include these new strains. Although it should be noted that “as new variants appear, the situation of how the correlation of infection and disease evolves”, but in any case “the variants should not decrease efficacy,” he said.
“What does decrease effectiveness is that people continue not to maintain sanitary measures and, therefore, more infections are generated. The more infections that occur, causes more viral circulation, and if there is more viral circulation, the effectiveness of the vaccines decreasesGarcia warned.
Read also: ISP might recommend that AstraZeneca vaccine not be given in some groups
AstraZeneca
Given the cases of thrombosis observed in patients who have received the AstraZeneca vaccine, the expert indicated that this dose “No need to go through a new review” at the ISP, emphasizing the importance of the antecedents obtained by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to determine a correlation in these cases.
“It is important to determine this causality in order to include it in the technical data sheet of the vaccine. and indicate that there are certain contraindications with certain people with whom you probably have to be more careful, “he added.
Read also: ISP asks pharmacies to make the sale of contraceptives more flexible and not require a prescription
Contraceptives
Finally, García referred to the recent controversy that caused outrage in the population and that was related to the requirement to present a prescription when buying contraceptive pills through delivery applications.
According to the director of the ISP, this provision occurred because “a supervised sale is recommended” of this drug. And what is supervision, “is basically linked to the safety issues of the use of medicines”.
“Contraceptive pills in women, for example, who are smokers and who are between 30 and 40 years old, can cause them to thrombus,” he declared. Therefore, he pointed out that the role of this supervision is to “guide and advise women well to use contraceptives properly. Not to restrict the sale“.
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