Letters to the Editor: We are not out of woods so vaccinate more quickly

A doze of the Moderna Covid-19 vaccine is prepared to be administered. Picture: File Picture

The National Immunisation Advisory Committee (NIAC) will this week advise on the use of the J&Js vaccine. With a similar risk profile to AstraZeneca’s vaccine, they may recommend limiting use to the over 60s. Unfortunately, if we limit the use of these viral vector vaccines to specific ages it will slow public vaccination. The risk of severe blood clotting events is between 1 and 10 cases per million. These events are serious but very rare; they are also treatable. The EMA advised: “Benefits continue to far outweigh the risks.” Internationally, the situation is precarious with 1.9m Covid cases in India over seven days. These rates are due to political mismanagement, taking
insufficient preventative measures. What isn’t political are high mortality rates among younger people compared to previous waves. In Delhi, 65% of cases are under 40 years. There is a real possibility that these rates are due to the emergence of worrying variants. The situation in India, and how Europe is reacting, has parallels with the start of the pandemic when people believed it was something “far away” which would not affect us. There was a feeling that everything would blow over, it was just a bad flu; we could ignore the negative stories despite the evidence. We’re in a better position than we were then, the vaccines are working.

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