LOS ANGELES – The California state epidemiologist is pushing for more than 300,000 vaccinations against coronavirus to be stopped using a Moderna vaccine version, as some people received medical treatment for potentially serious allergic reactions.
Dr. Erica S. Pan advised health care providers on Sunday to stop lot 41L20A of the Moderna vaccine pending the completion of an investigation by government officials, Moderna, the US Centers for Disease Control and the federal Food and Drug Administration.
“Out of extreme caution and also because we recognize the extremely limited range of vaccines, we are recommending providers to use other available vaccine inventory,” Pan said in a statement.
She said that between January 5 and January 12, more than 330,000 doses of the lot arrived in California and were distributed to 287 providers.
Less than 10 people, all of whom received the vaccine at the same community site, required medical attention over a 24-hour period, Pan said. No other comparable clusters have been found.
Pan has not specified the number of cases involved or where they occurred.
However, six health workers in San Diego had allergic reactions to vaccines they received at a large-scale vaccination center on January 14. The site was temporarily closed and is now using other vaccines, KTGV-TV reported.
Modern MRNA,
in a statement, the company said “is not aware of similar side effects from other vaccination centers that may have administered vaccines from the same batch.”
The CDC has said that COVID-19 vaccines can cause side effects for several days, including fever, chills, headache, swelling, or fatigue, “which are normal signs that your body is building up protection.”
However, serious reactions are extremely rare. Pan said that in a vaccine similar to Moderna, the rate of anaphylaxis – in which an immune system response can block breathing and cause blood pressure to drop – 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 infections, which has led to record hospitalizations and deaths.
California, with a population of 40 million, has shipped about 3.2 million doses of the vaccine – requiring two doses for full immunization – to local health departments and healthcare systems, the state’s Department of Health reported Monday.
Only about 1.4 million of those doses, or about 40%, have been administered.
Until now. the state vaccinated fewer than 2,500 people per 100,000 residents, a percentage well below the national average, according to federal data.
Although Governor Gavin Newsom announced last week that everyone 65 and older would be eligible to receive the vaccine, Los Angeles County and some others have said they don’t have enough doses to vaccinate so many people and are focusing on it first. vaccination of health care workers and the most vulnerable elderly 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 vaccinations in schools for staff, local community members, and for students as soon as a vaccine for children has been approved. .
“This will allow schools to reopen as soon as possible and in the safest way,” said Chief Inspector Austin Beutner.
California is nearing 3 million coronavirus cases and more than 33,600 people have died since the pandemic started last year, according to figures from Johns Hopkins University.
The COVID-19 death rate in Los Angeles County – the country’s most populous country and an epicenter of the state pandemic – equates to 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 10 days to accommodate a backlog of bodies in hospitals and funeral homes.
“The current mortality rate is more than double that in pre-pandemic years,” the agency said.
On average, California has seen about 500 deaths and 40,000 new cases every day in the past two weeks. Although hospital and intensive care unit admissions showed a slight downward trend, officials have warned that this could reverse when the full impact of transmissions is felt at Christmas and New Year’s Eve gatherings.
“As the number of cases continues to rise in California, the total number of people with serious consequences will also increase,” the state health department said in a statement Monday.
Even more concerns, California is experiencing new, potentially more transmissible forms of COVID-19.
The state health department announced on Sunday that an L452R variant of the virus is increasingly common in the genetic sequencing of COVID-19 test samples from various provinces.
The variant was first identified in California and other states and countries last year, but has been identified more frequently since November and in several major outbreaks in Santa Clara County, Northern California, the department said.
Overall, 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 in San Francisco.
However, not all test samples receive genetic sequencing to identify variants, so its frequency was not immediately apparent.
However, health officials said it was linked to a Christmas outbreak at Kaiser Permanente San Jose that infected at least 89 staff and patients and killed a receptionist. The outbreak was attributed to an employee who visited the hospital emergency room wearing an air-powered inflatable Christmas tree costume.
The variant differs from another mutation, B117, which was first reported in the UK and appears to spread much more easily, although it doesn’t appear to make people any sicker.
That variant has already surfaced in San Diego County, and Los Angeles County announced last weekend that it had discovered its first case.