Covid-19 latest updates: Rich countries with low vaccination rates take a second look at Oxford-AstraZeneca shot - The Washington Post

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Oxford-AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine had been spurned by some rich countries in preference for messenger RNA shots like those made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. But the Anglo-Swedish vaccine is getting a second look as much of the world scrambles to inoculate itself against the highly transmissible delta variant.

Amid a prolonged outbreak in Sydney, Australia’s vaccine authority now advises all adults in the country’s largest metropolitan area to “strongly consider getting vaccinated with any available vaccine including covid-19 vaccine AstraZeneca.”

The AstraZeneca shot is also getting renewed attention in Japan, which is considering using it to vaccinate people in their 40s and 50s, according to a report in Nikkei. Japan had previously planned to primarily use the vaccine for those 60 and older, if supplies of the mRNA vaccines preferred by its national inoculation program run low, and held off from mass use of the shot due to worries about rare blood clots. Tokyo has previously donated millions of doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine to allies in East and Southeast Asia.

Here are some significant developments:

• Pfizer published data showing that its vaccine provides strong protection against severe disease six months after the second dose. But protection against symptomatic infection decreases slightly in that same time period.
• Israel is moving toward making booster shots available for older adults. The director general of the Health Ministry is expected to accept the recommendation from its health officials in coming days and decide whether the target group will include people older than 65 or older than 75.
• Netflix will reportedly require cast members of its U.S. productions and crew who come into close contact with them to be vaccinated.
• The United States will send 1.5 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to Thailand and more than one million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to Cambodia, as Southeast Asia faces a spike in cases, the White House said.
• Australia’s New South Wales state, in which Sydney in located, saw its highest daily caseload on Thursday as 239 new infections were reported. A strict lockdown has been extended until late August.

The updated guidance from Australia issued last weekend was sparked by the increasing risk of covid infection in the area, the Australian Technical Group on Immunization said, as well as shortages of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The group also said that people in hotspots who had already received their first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine could receive their second dose four to eight weeks later, instead of waiting the previously-advised 12 weeks.

Australia in June had recommended the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine over the AstraZeneca shot for people between 16 to 60 years old, due to concerns over clots. The Oxford-AstraZeneca shot is a more traditional adenovirus vaccine.

An AstraZeneca-funded study of its vaccine published this week in the Lancet medical journal found that the risk of clots was significantly lower after the second dose — equivalent to the rate in unvaccinated people — than after the first.

Japan, too, is battling a weeks-long surge in coronavirus cases. It’s reporting more than 5,000 cases per day on average, according to data from its health ministry. Most of the new infections are occurring in people in their 20s and 30s.

New Zealand’s drug regulatory authority on Thursday granted “provisional approval” to use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine on those above 18. But the approval came with a caveat: The government has yet to consider whether to use the vaccine on its own population.

Instead, the provisional approval is “an important step towards enabling the donation of AstraZeneca from New Zealand to Pacific countries, where we have made commitments,” said Ayesha Verrall, the country’s acting minister for covid-19.

She said in a statement that Pfizer-BioNTech is still the preferred vaccine in New Zealand, and that the government is expecting to have enough supplies to fully inoculate its entire population with the shots by the end of the year. “No one will miss out,” Verrall said.

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