WHO says J&J vaccine is effective in countries with new Covid-19 strains
GENEVA: The World Health Organization’s (WHO) expert vaccine advisers said on Wednesday they could recommend Johnson and Johnson’s Covid-19 jab for use in countries where coronavirus variants of concern are circulating.
The vaccine has proven effective “in the countries where there is a high spread of the variants”, Alejandro Cravioto, the chair of the WHO’s Strategic Advisory Group of Experts (SAGE) on Immunisation, told reporters.
“After reviewing the evidence, we have a vaccine that shows to be safe and it shows to have the necessary efficacy to be recommended for use by us in people over the age of 18, without an upper age limit.”
The WHO gave its seal of approval to the single-shot J&J vaccine on Friday. It joins the two-dose Pfizer-BioNTech jab and the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccines made in India and in South Korea as having been signed off by the WHO.
The WHO also reported there was a 10% rise in new coronavirus cases globally last week, driven by surges in the Americas and Europe. The world body said in its weekly update on the status of the global outbreak published on Wednesday, the worldwide number of new Covid-19 cases peaked in early January at nearly 5 million cases, but then dropped to about 2.5 million cases per week in mid-February.
In Europe, the WHO said new confirmed cases rose by about 6% while deaths have been “consistently declining”. It said the highest numbers were recorded in France, Italy and Poland.
Australia said it will ask AstraZeneca and the European authorities to divert 1 million contracted Covid-19 vaccine doses to Papua New Guinea (PNG) amid worsening epidemiological situation in the southwestern Pacific nation, Prime Minister Scott Morrison said.
“With the support of the PNG government we’re making a formal request to AstraZeneca and the European authorities to access 1 million doses of our contracted supplies of AstraZeneca not for Australia, but for PNG, a developing country in desperate need of these vaccines,” Morrison said as quoted by ABC News.
Pregnant women vaccinated against Covid-19 could pass along protection to their babies, according to a new study in Israel. According to the research conducted in February, antibodies were detected in all 20 women administered both doses of the Pfizer vaccine during their third trimester of pregnancy and in their newborns, through placental transfer.