Many countries in the Asia-Pacific region present the first features of COVID-19 this week.
Here is a review of the main developments:
SOUTH KOREA
South Korea’s leading infectious disease experts warned that vaccines will not end the disease and called for continued vigilance in social distancing and the use of masks as the country prepares to make its first shots on Friday.
Jeong Eun-kyeong, director of Korea’s Disease Control and Prevention Agency, said Wednesday that it would be “a long time” before the mass vaccination campaign controlled the virus.
The country aims to vaccinate more than 70% of the population in November. But a safe return to a life without masks is highly unlikely this year, given several factors, including the growing spread of virus variants, said Choi Won Suk, a professor of infectious diseases at Ansan Hospital at the University of Korea. .
“We are concerned that people may leave the guard when vaccination begins, causing another massive wave of the virus,” Jeong said.
Jeong spoke as South Korea began transporting the first vaccines coming out of a production line to the southern city of Andong, where local pharmaceutical company SK Bioscience manufactures the catches developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University.
The country will begin vaccination on Friday starting with residents and employees of long-term care facilities.
Separately, some 55,000 doctors, nurses and other health professionals treating patients with COVID-19 will begin receiving vaccines developed by Pfizer and BioNTech on Saturday.
AUSTRALIA
Two elderly people have been given higher doses of the prescribed Pfizer vaccine, Australia’s Health Minister said on Wednesday.
The 88-year-old man and 94-year-old woman were being monitored and the doctor who administered the shootings had been removed from the vaccination program, Health Minister Greg Hunt said.
The mistake occurred at the Holy Spirit nursing home in the suburb of Carseldine, Brisbane, on Tuesday, the day after the vaccine was launched in Australia, Hunt said.
“Both patients are being 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’s Care Services homeowner said he was “very concerned” about the welfare of residents. The woman remained at home while the man had been admitted to a hospital, Hopper said.
“This incident has been very distressing for us, for our residents and for their families and it is also very worrying,” Hopper said. “It has made us question whether some of the doctors who have been given the job of administering the vaccine have received the proper training.”
Hunt later revealed that the doctor who administered the overdoses had not completed the online training to be conducted by all health professionals involved in the program.
Hunt apologized for having previously told 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 he works for.
THAILAND
Thailand on Wednesday received the first 200,000 doses of China’s Sinovac vaccine.
Another 117,000 doses of AstraZeneca are expected by Wednesday later.
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 in China.
By the end of this year, local manufacturer Siam Bioscience will supply 200 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine for the region, of which 26 million will go to Thailand. Thai officials have 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 hiring plans for being too slow and inadequate.
Thailand, whose economy is based on tourism revenue, 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 Malaysia’s first COVID-19 vaccine on Wednesday at the start of the inoculation campaign.
“I did not hear anything. It all ended before I knew it, just like a normal injection. Don’t worry, show up at any time, ”he said at a live broadcast ceremony.
Health Director General Noor Hisham Abdullah was also one of the first to be vaccinated.
Malaysia, which has signed agreements with several vaccine suppliers, including Pfizer and AstroZeneca, aims to vaccinate up to 80% of the 32 million people next year.
In the first phase, priority will be given to more than half a million health and front-line workers.
CHINA
Chinese regulators are studying two more potential COVID-19 vaccines, one from state-owned company Sinopharm and another from a private company, CanSino.
Both companies said vaccine candidates were sent to regulators this week for approval.
China has already approved two vaccines it has been using in a mass vaccination campaign. One of them is also from Sinopharm, but was developed by its Beijing subsidiary.
Sinopharm said its candidate vaccine is 72.51% effective. Both features of Sinopharm are based on inactivated viruses, a traditional technology by which a live virus is killed and then purified. The inactivated virus triggers an immune response.
The CanSino vaccine is a single-dose vaccine that relies on a harmless common cold virus, called an adenovirus, to administer the virus’s ear gene to the body. The body then makes the proteins in the ear and then generates an immune response. The technology is similar to both Astrazeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, which depend on different adenoviruses.
CanSino said its vaccine candidate is 65.28% effective.
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