“There are no reasons not to give people over 65 years of age the AstraZeneca vaccine.” With these words, Alejandro Cravioto, chair of the expert committee advising the World Health Organization (WHO) on vaccines against covid-19, on Wednesday questioned the strategy Europe is following with this drug. Countries representing at least two-thirds of the entire EU population, including France, Germany and Italy, have announced that they will only administer this vaccine to minors. Some, like Spain, have cut it down to age 55.
The reasons given by the WHO experts are the same as those used by countries such as the United Kingdom to inject the Anglo-Swedish drug in the elderly: although in clinical studies there was a small population over 55 years old and none statistically significant difference. sample as To test their efficacy against each other, the immune response is very similar to that of younger people. “Since we have identified the over-65s as a priority group, there should be no age limit for administering the vaccine,” said Cravioto, who has also recommended taking the drug regardless of the predominant variant of the virus. Although the vaccine has shown a slightly lower response in the British and significantly less in the South African, it still protects against the disease. And more importantly, in Cravioto’s words, “there is circumstantial evidence” that they prevent the most serious forms of COVID. This claim cannot be blunted either, as the samples are still too small to make the evidence strong.
Dr. Alejandro Cravioto in a virtual WHO conference. On video, Cravioto also recommends the AstraZeneca vaccine for people over 65.
In any case, the WHO believes that given the vaccine shortage that currently exists in the world, countries should not be shy when it comes to using AstraZeneca to protect, to a greater or lesser extent, the elderly, who are the most being vulnerable. to suffer the most serious consequences of covid, including death. In Spain, 6 in 10 people who died in the second wave were over 80 years old. The agency’s experts also recommend the vaccine, even to other groups where it has not been sufficiently proven, such as pregnant or breastfeeding women, as long as they are at high risk of infection.
Had it been decided to vaccinate the elderly with the drug AstraZeneca, their mass immunization could have started this week. They will not receive 1.8 million doses until February, enough to give almost half of people over 80 the first puncture and then continue with the rest, as 12 weeks have to pass between the first and second vaccinations. But older people will have to wait until the end of this month and the beginning of the following month, depending on the autonomous communities.
The decision was made last week by a majority of the National Health System’s public health committee, made up of technicians from the autonomous communities and the ministry. The argument is that the vaccine is not tested in the elderly and that it is better for the most vulnerable to wait for the most effective vaccines: those from Pfizer and Moderna. The major medical associations in the country agree with this argument. If there was no expectation that they would get these two drugs in the short term, they would be happy to use AstraZenecas, but given the impending turn, they prefer to be conservative. This is how the Association of Preventive Medicine, Public Health, Gerontology, Vaccination and Epidemiology has expressed itself.
This clashes with other voices, a minority within the scientific community in Spain, but who are sounding abroad, demanding to use the vaccine in the elderly as soon as possible to protect them. Five autonomous communities asked for more flexibility with the vaccine and also for injecting older people: Catalonia, Andalusia, Madrid, Aragon and Castilla y León. In any case, the first two have announced that they will repeat it again in the Inter-territorial Council to be held next Wednesday.