LOS ANGELES – California state epidemiologist is urging to stop more than 300,000 coronavirus vaccines using a Modern vaccine version because some people received medical treatment for possible severe allergic reactions.
Dr. Erica S. Pan on Sunday recommended that providers stop using batch 41L20A of the Modern vaccine pending an investigation by state officials, Moderna, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, and the U.S. Federal Food and Drug Administration
“Outside of an extreme abundance of precaution and also acknowledging the extremely limited supply of vaccines, we recommend that suppliers use other available vaccine inventories,” Pan said in a statement.
He said more than 330,000 doses of the batch arrived in California between Jan. 5 and 12 and were distributed to 287 suppliers.
Less than ten people, who received the vaccine at the same site in the community, needed medical attention for a 24-hour period, Pan said. No other similar clusters were found.
Pan did not specify the number of cases involved or where they occurred.
However, six San Diego health workers had allergic reactions to the vaccines they received at a mass vaccination center on Jan. 14. The site was temporarily closed and now uses other vaccines, KTGV-TV reported.
Modern MRNA,
in a statement, the company was said to be “unaware of comparable adverse events from other vaccination centers that may have administered vaccines from the same batch.”
The CDC has said COVID-19 vaccines can cause side effects for a few days that include fever, chills, headache, bloating or tiredness, “which are normal signs your body is protecting.”
However, severe reactions are extremely rare. Pan said in a vaccine similar to Modern, the rate of anaphylaxis, in which a reaction of the immune system can block breathing and cause a drop in blood pressure, was about 1 in 100,000.
The announcement came as California counties continue to advocate for more COVID-19 vaccine as the state tries to reduce the infection rate, which has resulted in a record number of hospitalizations and deaths.
California, with a population of 40 million, has sent about 3.2 million doses of the vaccine (requiring two doses for full vaccination) to local health departments and health care systems, according to the state Department of Public Health reported Monday.
Only about 1.4 million of these doses have been administered, or about 40%.
Bye now. the state has vaccinated less than 2,500 people per 100,000 residents, a rate that falls well below the national average, according to federal data.
Although Gov. Gavin Newsom announced last week that anyone 65 or older would be eligible to start getting the vaccine, Los Angeles County and a few others have said they don’t have enough doses to vaccinate so many people and that they first focus on inoculating health care workers and the most vulnerable seniors living in care homes.
On Monday, the Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent sent a letter to state and county public health officials requesting permission to provide COVID-19 vaccines to schools for staff, members of the local community and for students once the childhood vaccine has been approved. .
“Doing so will help open schools as soon as possible and in the safest way possible,” Superintendent Austin Beutner wrote.
California is approaching 3 million cases of coronavirus and more than 33,600 people have died since the pandemic began last year, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The mortality rate for COVID-19 in Los Angeles County, the most populous in the country and an epicenter of the state pandemic, reaches about one person every six minutes.
On Sunday, the South Coast Air Quality Management District suspended some pollution control limits on the number of cremations for at least ten days to address the backlog of bodies in hospitals and funeral homes.
“The current mortality rate is more than double that of pre-pandemic years,” the agency said.
On average, California has recorded about 500 deaths and 40,000 new cases a day over the past two weeks. Although hospitalizations and admissions to intensive care units continued a slight downward trend, officials have warned that it could be reversed when the full impact of transmissions is noticed during the Christmas and New Year meetings. .
“As the number of cases continues to rise in California, so will the total number of people who will have serious outcomes,” the state health department said in a statement Monday.
In addition, California is experimenting with new, possibly more transmissible, forms of COVID-19.
The state health department announced Sunday that an L452R variant of the virus is increasingly appearing in the genetic sequencing of COVID-19 test samples from several counties.
The variant was first identified last year in California and other states and countries, but has been identified more frequently since November and in several major outbreaks in northern Santa Clara County, the department.
In general, the variant has been found in at least a dozen counties. In some places. Tests have found the variant in a quarter of the sequenced samples, said Dr. Charles Chiu, a virologist and professor of laboratory medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
However, not all test samples receive genetic sequencing to identify variants, so their frequency was not immediate.
However, health officials said it was related to a Christmas outbreak at Kaiser Permanent San Jose that infected at least 89 staff members and patients, and killed a receptionist. The outbreak has been attributed to an employee who visited the hospital emergency room wearing an inflatable Christmas tree inflatable dress with air.
The variant is different from another mutation, B117, which was first reported in the UK and appears to spread much more easily, although it does not appear to make people sicker.
This variant has already appeared in San Diego County and Los Angeles County, he announced over the weekend that he had detected his first case.