South Korea will authorize the use of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine for people aged 65 and older, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said on Thursday, a move that would enable the country to increase its vaccination action.
The country has been launching the vaccine since the last week of February, with the elderly and health workers, but has excluded more than 370,000 people over the age of 65 in nursing homes, citing a lack of clinical trial data on the age group.
In the actual data from Britain, it now appears that AstraZeneca and Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccines are both more than 80% effective in preventing hospitalizations older than 80 after one shot.
“Vaccination has been delayed for those aged 65 and over due to lack of evidence to determine the efficacy of the AstraZeneca vaccine, but data have recently been released in the UK to prove its efficacy for the elderly,” Chung said. a government meeting said.
South Korea will begin vaccinating 376,000 patients and staff aged 65 and over in nursing hospitals and other facilities this month, the Korean disease management company (KDCA), official Kwon Jun wook, said at a briefing.
Kwon said he expects the age group, which reported the majority of deaths, to reach herd immunity levels by the end of September.
Health authorities also included about 20,000 second-quarter flight attendants in the list for second-quarter recipients because they were vulnerable to more communicable variants and were exempt from self-quarantine.
South Korea has so far reported a total of 257 new virus variants, including 154 cases of the variant first identified in Britain and 21 of the variant discovered in South Africa, according to the KDCA.
Another 7 million doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine will be rolled out from the last week of May, with 7 million of Pfizer’s product by June. The KDCA is in talks with Moderna and Johnson & Johnson to import their vaccines in the second quarter.
According to the KDCA, 500,635 people received a first dose of AstraZeneca or Pfizer BioNTech vaccines as of Wednesday. South Korea reported 465 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, bringing the total to 94,198 infections, with 1,652 deaths.
Reporting by Sangmi Cha; Edited by Stephen Coates