N.M. readies for vaccine rollout

Health care workers to receive 1st doses set to arrive Tuesday

As early as Monday, limited volumes of vaccines designed to boost immunity to COVID-19 will begin to be delivered to some regions of the U.S. for emergency use, including 17,550 doses designated for New Mexico.

There are some downsides: The vaccines can have side effects, not everyone will get inoculated and the immunization could require yearly doses similar to flu shots.

Two experts from the Mayo Clinic provided details about the vaccines in a media briefing, as Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham and state health officials announced the first doses from drugmaker Pfizer were expected to arrive by Tuesday.

New Mexico’s initial vaccines will be distributed to health care workers.

Lujan Grisham said a shipment from Moderna was expected to follow and would be distributed to nursing homes and other long-term care facilities.

Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines will require at least two doses per person and are reported to have relatively mild side effects.

“The vaccines are both overall quite safe,” said Dr. Abinash Virk, an infectious disease specialist at the Mayo Clinic who spoke in a news conference Wednesday. “They both have some degree of what I call mild to moderate symptoms. These are not severe, adverse reactions.”

Common side effects are chills, body aches, fatigue and headaches, she said, adding about 15 percent of test subjects experienced fever.

The symptoms came more often after the second dose and usually went away within seven days, she added.

When the vaccine is more widely distributed, some people will be

excluded, including pregnant women and people whose immune systems are extremely weakened, including from surgeries such as bone marrow transplants.

Severe allergy sufferers might be excluded, too, to avoid the risk of someone going into anaphylactic shock. Virk said a couple of people with a history of allergies had acute reactions during clinical tests.

Pregnant women initially will be barred because clinical trials haven’t delved into how the vaccine might affect unborn children, Virk said. Lactating women also might not receive the vaccine because there’s been no research on whether it might be transmitted to babies through breast milk, she said.

Pfizer had 23 women become pregnant after they finished clinical trials, Virk said. Eleven had received placebos and the other 12 will have to be examined to see if there are any effects on their pregnancies.

The Food and Drug Administration has yet to decide a cutoff age for children receiving the vaccine, but it might end up at 16, the youngest age of participants in clinical trials, Virk said.

She said the first shot triggers antibodies and the second one boosts the antibodies’ production. A shot or two after the initial pair of doses will lengthen the time a person remains immune.

Because these vaccines have been studied only since March, their exact duration is unknown, she said. People might have to get shots annually or even more often.

Dr. Melanie Swift, who specializes in occupational medicine at the Mayo Clinic, likened the multiple shots to giving one’s immune system repeated lessons on combating the virus.

“I tell patients your immune system is learning — it’s learning to fight off the virus,” Swift said.

People are wary of taking a vaccine that was developed more swiftly than past vaccines, she said, but she emphasized rigorous safety protocols are still being followed.

“It’s understandable that we have a public that’s a little skeptical and a little hesitant because this vaccine has been developed with astonishing speed,” Swift said. “But the public should know that no safety shortcuts were taken.”

Some normal procedural barriers were removed through Operation Warp Speed — an effort by the U.S. government and private partners to develop and distribute COVID-19 vaccines — and incentives were offered to companies to make the ventures less financially risky, with the aim of luring more developers, Swift said.

Intensive monitoring will be done of people vaccinated through clinical trials and the emergency-use deliveries, tracking side effects and the vaccines’ effectiveness, Swift said. She noted that monitoring could last for as long as two years.

Virk noted 38,000 people took part in clinical trials, compared with the 5,000 to 6,000 who normally participate in such trials, creating a better gauge for how well a vaccine works.

Still, there’s no way to know how effective the vaccine is in quelling community spread until it is widely distributed, she said.

“We will know very quickly in the next … maybe three to six months, what impact vaccinations are going to have in the whole epidemic,” Virk said.