BARCELONA, Spain (AP) - European countries diverged Wednesday on whether they would push ahead with giving their resi dents Johnson & Johnson's COVID 19 vaccine after reports of very rare blood clots in a handful of recipi ents in the United States. While some European Union members put the vac cine on hold as recommend ed by the American company, Poland, France and Hungary said they would go ahead and administer the doses that had arrived as the EU's 27 nations face continuing pres sure to speed up their immu nization drives. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, distributed in Europe by its subsidiary Janssen, is a key part of Europe's vaccination cam paign, which has been criti cized as sluggish. Of the four vaccines currently approved for use in the EU, J&J's is the only one that requires a sin gle dose to be fully effective. That makes it ideal for hard to reach, vulnerable groups, such as those who are home less or migrant workers. But the drugmaker decid ed Tuesday to delay deliver ies to Europe after the Food and Drug Administration rec ommended a pause in the vaccine's use in the U.S. while the rare clot cases are exam ined. The decision was the latest blow to the vaccine rollout in Europe, which already experienced a similar clot scare with the vaccine developed by British Swedish company AstraZeneca. The European Medicines Agency, the EU's regulatory agency for pharmaceutical products, has not advised EU members to put the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on hold. It said Wednesday: "The com pany (J&J) is in contact with national authorities, recom mending to store the doses already received until the PRAC (EMA's safety commit tee) issues an expedited rec ommendation." It's not clear if the exceed ingly rare reports in the U.S. - so far, six cases out of about 7 million inoculations - are linked to the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. But European regulators already have declared that the unusual type of clots are pos sibly linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is made with technology sim ilar to Johnson & Johnson's product. The AstraZeneca vaccine is in wide use around the globe, though not yet in the U.S. Several countries have imposed age restrictions on its use because of the clot concerns. Denmark, which put the vaccine on hold last month, decided Wednesday not to resume using the shots it had on hand, saying that citizens who had received a first dose would be offered a second dose of a different vaccine. Still, experts agree COVID 19 poses a much larger risk of death and hospitalization than the potential threat of atypical clots. But the con cerns could still undermine public confidence in these vaccines and in the entire vaccination effort. On Wednesday, advisers to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are expected to debate how to handle the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The EMA, which approved the vaccine last month, said Wednesday that it will make a recommendation likely next week on how to proceed with the vaccine. Until then, the regulator said that it "remains of the view that the benefits of the vaccine in preventing COVID 19 outweigh the risks of side effects." For Poland, that meant there was no reason to wait. "In line with these recom mendations (by the EMA), we will want to use it in inocula tions," Polish Health Minister Adam Niedzielski said. France, which received 200,000 doses, said it is also sticking to its plan to start administering the vaccine in the middle of next week to people age 55 and over. Hungary also said it would move ahead with the doses it received. It plans to distrib ute them using buses that bring vaccines to rural areas. Other countries, however, decided to hold up. Italian Health Minister Roberto Speranza said his government was waiting for further information from the FDA and the EMA to decide how to proceed with the ini tial 180,000 doses that arrived in Italy Tuesday. "But I think this vaccine must be used because it's an important vaccine, and the U.S. decision was a precau tionary one, and the choice of Johnson & Johnson to not immediately put it on the market in Europe was also a precautionary choice," Speranza said. "Our hope is that these knots can be resolved as soon as possible so we can use this vaccine, which would be the fourth one and is particularly useful for us," he said. The Netherlands also put the 80,000 Johnson & Johnson doses it received into storage, as did Denmark, Croatia and Romania with their batches. South Africa suspended the shot as a "pre cautionary measure." The European Union has for weeks been looking at Britain with envy as the vac cination program of its for mer member outpaced its own. The J&J shot was sup posed to help it play catch up. Under a contract with the European Commission, 200 million doses were supposed to arrive in the second quar ter of this year. That deal allowed for the purchase of an additional 200 million doses. Despite this week's delay, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Snchez said the EU was still on track to vaccinate 70% of adults by the end of the summer. Spain - which received an initial shipment of 146,000 doses that are now on hold - planned to use the shots to target groups that have been missed so far, including homeless people and migrant workers. Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz also down played the impact of the delay that came hours after the first doses were delivered to his country. "I can only tell you that, with the more than 8 million doses we will have delivered by the summer - we will be able to able to offer everyone a first dose. I said at Easter within 100 days, and from today's point of view I would stick to that," Kurz said. The trouble with Johnson & Johnson comes after vari ous delays in shipments of other vaccines to Europe and the concerns with the AstraZeneca BioNTech vac cine that first led countries to suspend its use and then impose a dizzying array of age restrictions on it. Spain, for instance, went from using AstraZeneca on young people at first, to now only giving it people ages 60 69. In a sign of the bloc's cur rent thinking, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced Wednesday that the bloc will start negotiating to buy 1.8 billion doses of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine through 2023.
WORLD
Thursday, April 15, 2021
TIMES-UNION
Warsaw, Indiana
5B
Photo by As ociated Pres
Boxes stand next to vials of Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine in the pharmacy of National Jewish Hospital for distribution in east Denver.
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Europe Scrambles As J&J Vaccine Delay Deals Another Blow Mumbai Imposes Strict Virus Restrictions As Infections Surge
MUMBAI (AP) - The teeming metropolis of Mumbai and other parts of Maharashtra, the Indian state worst hit by the pandemic, face stricter restrictions for 15 days starting Wednesday in an effort to stem the surge of coronavirus infections. Top state officials stressed that the closure of most industries, businesses, public places and limits on the movement of people didn't constitute a lockdown. Last year, a sudden, harsh, nationwide lockdown left millions jobless overnight. Stranded in cities with no income or food, thousands of migrant workers walked on highways to get home. Since then, state leaders have repeatedly stressed that another lockdown wasn't on the cards. The distinction did little to allay Ramachal Yadav's anxi eties. On Wednesday morn ing, he joined thousands of others at a Mumbai railway station getting on a train back home. "There is no work," said the 45 year old. India has detected over 180,000 new infections in the past 24 hours, about a third in Maharashtra state. India has so far confirmed over 13.9 million cases and 172,000 dead in what is l ikely an undercount. Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray said that most public places, shops and establishments will be shut starting 8 p.m. Wednesday, expect essential services like grocery shops and banks. Although the state has announced a relief package of $728 million that will include assistance for the poor, industry experts say that the new restrictions might prove fatal for busi nesses that were only just recovering from last year's economic recession. "Livelihoods are impor tant, but life is more impor tant," Thackeray said, echo ing a difficult choice faced by other states in India. The scenes playing out in Maharashtra in the past week mirror those developing in other parts of the country: patients gasping for air turned away from hospitals that are running out of oxy gen and weeping families waiting their turn to bid farewell to their loved ones at crematoria. Compounding concerns is the question of whether India, despite being the world's largest maker of vac cines, will have enough to immunize its vast population swiftly enough to slow down the virus.
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