Many nations in the Asia-Pacific region are launching the first photos for COVID-19 this week.
Here’s a look at major developments:
SOUTH KOREA
South Korea’s top infectious disease experts have warned that vaccines will not end the disease quickly and have called for continued vigilance over social distancing and wearing masks as the country prepares to take its first photos on Friday. .
Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of Korea’s Disease Control and Prevention Agency, said on Wednesday that it would take “a long time” for the mass vaccination campaign to control the virus.
The country aims to vaccinate more than 70% of the population by November. But a safe return to a life without masks is extremely unlikely this year, given a number of factors, including the growing spread of virus variants, said Choi Won Suk, a professor of infectious diseases at Ansan Korean University Hospital.
“We are concerned that people may lose their guard as vaccination begins, triggering another massive wave of the virus,” Jeong said.
Jeong spoke as South Korea began transporting the first vaccines launched from a production line in the southern city of Andong, where local pharmaceutical company SK Bioscience manufactures photos developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University.
The country will begin vaccination on Friday, starting with residents and employees of long-term care units.
Separately, approximately 55,000 physicians, nurses and other health care professionals treating patients with COVID-19 will begin receiving photos developed by Pfizer and BioNTech on Saturday.
AUSTRALIA
Two elderly people have been given higher doses than prescribed by the Pfizer vaccine, Australia’s health minister said on Wednesday.
The 88-year-old man and the 94-year-old woman were being monitored, and the doctor who administered the shots was stopped from the vaccination program, said Health Minister Greg Hunt.
The mistake occurred Tuesday at a Holy Spirit nursing home in the Carsis suburb of Brisbane, the day after the vaccine was launched in Australia, Hunt said.
Both patients are monitored and both patients show no signs of an adverse reaction, Hunt said. He did not say how much more was injected than the prescribed dose.
Lincoln Hopper, Executive Director of St. Vincent, who owns the house, said he was “very concerned” about the well-being of the residents. The woman remained at home while the man was hospitalized, Hopper said.
“This incident has been very painful for us, our residents and their families, and it is also very worrying,” Hopper said. It led us to wonder if some of the clinicians who received the vaccine had received adequate training.
Hunt later revealed that the doctor who administered the overdoses had not completed the online training that must be undertaken by all health professionals involved in the program.
Hunt apologized for previously telling Parliament that the doctor had been trained. He said he had asked the Department of Health to take action against the doctor and the company the doctor works for.
THAILAND
Thailand received the first 200,000 doses of China’s Sinovac vaccine on Wednesday.
Another 117,000 doses of AstraZeneca are expected later Wednesday.
Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha attended a ceremony with the deputy head of the Chinese embassy mission to receive the vaccines at Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport.
Thailand has ordered a total of 2 million doses from China.
Later this year, local producer Siam Bioscience will supply 200 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine for the region, of which 26 million are allocated to Thailand. Thai officials said they had reached an additional agreement with AstraZeneca for a total of 61 million doses.
Many critics and opposition parties have criticized the government’s public procurement plans as too slow and inadequate.
Thailand, whose economy is based on tourism revenues, aims to inject 10 million doses a month from June and plans to inoculate at least half of the population by the end of the year.
MALAYSIA
Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin received the first COVID-19 vaccine shot in Malaysia on Wednesday, at the beginning of the inoculation campaign.
“I did not feel anything at all. It was all over before I knew it, just like a normal injection. Don’t worry, come anytime, “he said at a live ceremony.
The director general of health, Noor Hisham Abdullah, was also among the first to be vaccinated.
Malaysia, which has signed agreements with several vaccine providers, including Pfizer and AstroZeneca, aims to vaccinate up to 80% of its 32 million people by next year.
More than half a million health and front-line employees will be given priority in the first phase.
CHINA
Chinese regulators are analyzing two more potential COVID-19 vaccines, one from state-owned Sinopharm and another from a private company, CanSino.
Both companies said their vaccine candidates were submitted to regulators this week for approval.
China has already approved two vaccines it has used in a mass immunization campaign. One of them is also from Sinopharm, but was developed by its Beijing branch.
Sinopharm said its vaccine candidate is 72.51% effective. Both photos from Sinopharm are based on inactivated viruses, a traditional technology by which a living virus is killed and then purified. The inactivated virus then triggers an immune response.
The CanSino vaccine is a single-dose vaccine that relies on a harmless common cold virus called adenovirus to deliver the virus’s spike gene to the body. Then the body produces spike proteins and then generates an immune response. The technology is similar to both Astrazeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, which are based on different adenoviruses.
CanSino said its vaccine candidate is 65.28% effective.
___
Follow the full coverage of the AP pandemic at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak