PARIS, April 8 (Reuters) – France’s top health agency will say 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 New-style messenger RNA vaccine, two sources aware of plans said Thursday.
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.
Messenger RNA vaccines cause the human body to produce a protein that mimics part of the virus, eliciting an immune response, while traditional vaccines like AstraZeneca use an inactivated virus to transport a protein from the pathogen (in this case the new coronavirus). the same thing.
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. (Report by Matthias Blamont; Edited by Kevin Liffey)