PARIS (Reuters) – France’s health agency will say on Friday that recipients of a first dose of AstraZeneca’s traditional COVID-19 vaccine, who are under 55, should receive a second shot with a new messenger RNA vaccine, two sources aware of said plans on Thursday.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that the Haute Autorite de la Sante (HAS), tasked with determining how vaccines approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in France should be used, is considering the possibility.
HAS has now decided to continue the plan, the two sources said. Two mRNA vaccines, one from Pfizer and BioNTech and one from Moderna, are approved for use in France.
RNA Messenger vaccines cause the human body to produce a protein that mimics part of the virus, triggering an immune response, while viral vector vaccines such as AstraZeneca use a common cold virus to carry DNA instructions to do the same.
A HAS spokeswoman had no comment.
Vaccination programs have been rampant in Europe and elsewhere over the past month, with very few young people receiving AstraZeneca shooting suffering extremely unusual blood clots, prompting some countries to suspend their use as a precaution. .
Most resumed the use of photography, although some did so with age restrictions.
In France, HAS advised on March 19 that only people over the age of 55 should receive the AstraZeneca vaccine, which had already been given to 500,000 people as a first dose.
While the numbers are small compared to the tens of millions that are inoculated across the EU, a decision to give a different boost would be significant, as the approach has not been tested in late human studies.
Germany was the first European country to recommend that people under 60 who had a first injection of AstraZeneca receive a different product for the second dose.
Some experts say that because all vaccines target the same external protein as the virus, they could be complementary. But there is no evidence that this approach will be as effective.