Official: Covid-19 vaccine is safe

By LULU MARK
THE Covid-19 vaccine AstraZeneca to be used in Papua New Guinea is safe and people must stop spreading misinformation about it, an official says.
National Control Centre (NCC) incident manager Dr Daoni Esorom told The National that his advice to the people, including medical and health professionals, that were spreading misleading information was to immediately stop.
“It’s unethical, it puts people lives at risk and benefits nobody,” he said.
“We are getting the AstraZeneca vaccine as it is the most used vaccine we have the cold chain capacity because the storage is two-eight degrees.”
Dr Esorom was responding to questions regarding some European countries putting a stop to its use because of blood clotting in patients.
He said countries such as Ireland, Denmark and Norway had stopped vaccinating using the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine while Germany and France were investigating the claims.
Dr Esorom said there was a certain batch of the vaccine that had caused all these side effects which had been identified and withdrawn already and the vaccination continued as the European medical agency (EMA) and the World Health Organisation (WHO) reviewed the data.
“The patients who had blood clots were elderly so they probably could have had hypertension or other underlying diseases at the time they received the vaccines,” he said.
“At the moment, there’s no association between having a clot, dying of a clot and the vaccine.
“The EMA, which approved the vaccine, said that the blood clots and vaccines were unrelated.
“The WHO has advised that vaccination should continue as the benefits of vaccines outweighed the risks. But the WHO is sitting tomorrow (today) to review the clinical data and outcome of these patients.”
Dr Esorom said the details of the cases the WHO independently asked the countries to present included the patient’s history, how they did the vaccination, the outcome, if they did some blood tests, toxicology or postmortem.