Rare cases of blood clots have also occurred with the AstraZeneca vaccine, which uses the same technology as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Chile received its first shipment of the AstraZeneca vaccine on April 23. Chilean health authorities announced that this vaccine will only be given to men.
The Chilean government announced that it received the first shipment of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus (Covid-19) vaccine on Friday, which will be given only to men, AFP reported from Santiago on April 23.
In Europe, the AstraZeneca vaccine, developed by the British laboratory in Cambridge and Sweden, has been restricted in many countries due to very rare cases of blood clots after vaccination, most of which occur in young patients, predominantly women.
The Chilean Institute of Public Health (ISP), which gave emergency approval to the AstraZeneca vaccine in January, had recommended last week that the vaccine be used in women over 55 and in men over 18. But Chile’s Deputy Health Minister Paula Daza announced Friday that starting next week, the vaccine “will be available only to men.”
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said Friday that after a new study, the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine increase with age and continue to outweigh its risks.
The EMA also said that while cases of blood clots have been reported to be more common in women, there is “insufficient data across the EU” to say that the risk is related to gender.
The AstraZeneca vaccine uses adenovirus as a vector, like Johnson & Johnson in the United States, Sputnik V in Russia and CanSino in China.
On Friday, experts from the U.S. health authorities recommended resuming vaccination in the United States with Johnson & Johnson’s serum vaccine, which has been suspended since April 13 due to a rare case of thrombosis.
The 158,400 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine that arrived in Chile on Friday are the first vaccines received by Chile under the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Vaccine Sharing (Covax) mechanism, which aims to ensure equitable access to vaccines against coronaviruses.
Chile is one of the fastest growing countries in the world in terms of vaccination. Some 7.9 million people have received at least one dose of the vaccine, out of a total population of 19 million.
The coronavirus pandemic has killed at least 3.073.969 people worldwide since the WHO office in China reported the outbreak in late December 2019, AFP reported Friday.
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