AstraZeneca, J&J setback could derail Covid-19 fight

BRUSSELS • Safety concerns over AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines have raised the spectre of the fight against Covid-19 being derailed should the suspected health risks posed by the formulations outweigh the benefits.

Countries like the United States have paused the use of the J&J vaccine, while others like Denmark have dropped AstraZeneca from their vaccination campaigns.

And now, the European Union has announced that it is putting trust and money into the Pfizer-BioNTech shot to salvage its vaccination roll-out and secure doses for the future, The New York Times reported yesterday.

The pivot away from AstraZeneca, once a pillar of the EU inoculation programme, comes after months of discord over delayed shipments and as the company battles worries over the rare potential side effects of its shots.

In announcing the change in strategy on Wednesday, Dr Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, said Pfizer had agreed to an early shipment of doses that she said would most likely allow the bloc to reach its goal of inoculating 70 per cent of adults by the end of the summer.

That goal was in jeopardy after AstraZeneca failed to deliver expected doses in the first quarter of the year, then suffered fresh setbacks over potential side effects related to blood clots.

The European vaccine campaign was dealt a further blow on Tuesday when Johnson & Johnson said it would delay its roll-out in Europe because of similar concerns and after regulators paused the use of its vaccine in the United States.

There was no indication that the EU was going to cancel existing orders for dozens of millions of doses from AstraZeneca and J&J, or that European health officials had changed their minds about the benefits of the shots outweighing any risks. But EU officials indicated that they would negotiate new deals only with companies that are producing Covid-19 vaccines based on messenger RNA, or mRNA, like Pfizer and Moderna.

Questions remain, however, on whether output can be ramped up by Pfizer and Moderna to match the supplies they will ostensibly replace, as well as the speed at which it can be done.

One estimate suggested that if companies were to galvanise India's vaccine manufacturing capacity, the output would amount to 8.2 billion doses of different vaccines a year - enough to jab everyone on the planet at least once.

But companies that have invested heavily in vaccine research and development are unlikely to share their patents gratis. As if to underline that commercial reality, a call on Wednesday by about 170 former country leaders and Nobel Prize laureates for US President Joe Biden to waive intellectual property rules for Covid-19 vaccines to give poorer countries access was met with silence from the White House.

Meanwhile, the coronavirus continues to spread at an alarming rate, with India the global epicentre. The South Asian nation witnessed more than 200,000 cases over a 24-hour period into yesterday, with more than 1,000 deaths, prompting lockdowns and curfews.

But in surreal scenes, hundreds of thousands of people took a dip in the Ganges River in the northern city of Haridwar yesterday, during a religious festival that is poised to be a super-spreader event.

In Malaysia, the authorities raised the alarm as the reproduction rate for the virus - which denotes how many people an infected person transmits the coronavirus to on average - hit 1.14 and new cases shot past the 2,000 mark for the first time since March 5.

Cases were rapidly rising in Thailand too, with the country reporting 1,543 new infections yesterday - the sharpest increase since the start of the pandemic and the fourth record rise in a week.

Farther east, Japan was mulling over whether to cancel the Olympic Games or just bar spectators as the country faced a surge in cases. It reported 729 new cases in Tokyo yesterday, the first time the number had crossed 700 since Feb 4.

In Europe, concerns rose that Germany's healthcare system is at a breaking point, with the occupancy rate in intensive care units rising to 88 per cent on Wednesday. The country reported 31,117 cases yesterday, the most since mid-January.

Ireland, on the other hand, was on track to ease restrictions, while job ads and restaurant bookings indicated that the British economy was on the mend, thanks to a successful vaccination campaign.

Meanwhile, Singapore confirmed 16 new cases yesterday, all of which were imported, according to the Ministry of Health.