Exclusive: French health agency says mRNA vaccine should be used as second dose after AstraZeneca

PARIS (Reuters) – France’s top health agency said on Friday that recipients of a first dose of AstraZeneca’s traditional COVID-19 vaccine under the age of 55 should receive a second vaccine with a messenger RNA vaccine new-style, two sources familiar with the say plans Thursday.

SHEET PHOTO: The ultrastructural morphology exhibited by the 2019 Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is seen in an illustration published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, USA on January 29, 2020. Alissa Eckert, MS; Dan Higgins, MAM / CDC / Handout through REUTERS. / Photo file

Reuters had reported on Wednesday that the High Authority for Health (HAS), which is responsible for determining how vaccines approved by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in France should be used, was considering this possibility.

The HAS has decided to continue with the plan, the two sources said. Two mRNA vaccines, one from Pfizer and BioNTech and one from Moderna, are approved for use in France.

Messaging RNA vaccines cause the human body to produce a protein that mimics part of the virus, eliciting an immune response, while viral vector vaccines like AstraZeneca use a common cold virus to carry DNA instructions to do the same.

A HAS spokeswoman made no comment.

Vaccination programs have been stuttering in Europe and elsewhere over the past month, as a few recipients, mostly young, of the AstraZeneca shot were found to have suffered extremely unusual blood clots, leading some countries to suspend its use as a precaution.

Most have resumed shooting, although some have done so with age restrictions.

In France, on 19 March the HAS warned that only people aged 55 and over should receive the AstraZeneca vaccine, which had already been administered to 500,000 people as a first dose.

While the figures are small compared to the tens of millions inoculated across the EU, the decision to give a different reinforcing feature would be significant because the approach has not been tested in final-stage human trials.

Germany was the first European country to recommend that people under the age of 60 who have received a first shot of AstraZeneca receive a different product for their 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 is so effective.

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