International Affairs

Sri Lanka will re­ceive 264, 000 doses of the much needed As­tra Zeneca vac­cines by early next month through the WHO’S Co­vax fa­cil­ity, the Daily Mir­ror learns.

The WHO has al­ready con­firmed the de­liv­ery of the doses to the Health Min­istry here in an of­fi­cial let­ter and the date of de­liv­ery has been men­tioned as early July.

The WHO has al­ready con­firmed the de­liv­ery of the doses to the Health Min­istry here in an of­fi­cial let­ter and the date of de­liv­ery has been men­tioned as early July.

The Daily Mir­ror learns that th­ese doses have been do­nated by cer­tain af­flu­ent na­tions which had over-pur­chased the As­tra Zeneca doses, to the Co­vax fa­cil­ity af­ter the WHO had made an ap­peal. The Health Min­istry is now pre­par­ing to uti­lize th­ese doses for those who had re­ceived the first jab but it has to be seen if a ‘fair method’ would be ap­plied in the in­oc­u­la­tion pro­ce­dure, af­ter al­le­ga­tions that the As­trazeneca sec­ond doses were only ad­min­is­tered to front line work­ers and those who had con­nec­tions, so far. With the ar­rival of th­ese 264,000 doses, the Health Min­istry will still be short of 336,000 doses of the As­trazeneca vac­cines as a to­tal of 600, 000 peo­ple await the sec­ond jab.

The Daily Mir­ror learns that the State Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal Cor­po­ra­tion has or­dered 1 mil­lion doses of the Pfizer vac­cines and this maybe uti­lized on the re­main­ing who are to re­ceive the As­tra Zeneca vac­cines as their sec­ond dose af­ter the WHO re­cently said there were some re­sults rec­om­mend­ing this com­bi­na­tion. The Daily Mir­ror gained ac­cess to a lat­est WHO doc­u­ment which stated that het­erol­o­gous (mix-and-match) stud­ies on­go­ing with re­gards to the in­ter­change­abil­ity of vac­cines where the Pfizer vac­cine was given as the sec­ond dose fol­low­ing a first dose of Ox­ford As­tra Zeneca vac­cine, showed a slightly in­creased but ac­cept­able re­ac­to­genic­ity with su­pe­rior or sim­i­lar im­muno­genic­ity re­sults, thus sup­port­ing the use of such a het­erol­o­gous prim­ing sched­ule in set­tings where the sec­ond dose for the Ox­ford As­trazeneca vac­cine is not avail­able due to vac­cine sup­ply con­straints or other con­cerns.

The WHO doc­u­ment fur­ther said that rec­om­men­da­tions will be up­dated as fur­ther in­for­ma­tion be­comes avail­able on in­ter­change­abil­ity be­tween vac­cine prod­ucts and plat­forms.

How­ever, it stressed that WHO also con­tin­ued with its rec­om­men­da­tion of the same prod­uct which should be used for both doses. If dif­fer­ent COVID-19 vac­cine prod­ucts are in­ad­ver­tently ad­min­is­tered in the two doses, no ad­di­tional doses of ei­ther vac­cine are rec­om­mended at this time, the WHO doc­u­ment said.(JAMILA HU­SAIN)

(Daily Mirror)