Boris Johnson and health experts defend AstraZeneca jab as Germany moves to limit Covid vaccine to under-65s Barney Davis
Boris Johnson and Public Health England have defended the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine after German experts recommended it should only be offered to under 65s.
The Prime Minister and health experts spoke in support of the jab following the draft recommendation from Germany s vaccination advisory committee, which argued there was insufficient data to recommend it for those aged 65 and over.
Dr Mary Ramsay, head of immunisations at PHE, acknowledged there had been too few cases of coronavirus in older people in Phase 3 clinical trials to determine the level of efficacy in this age group, but said other data on immune response had been reassuring .
UK Races Ahead With Vaccine, Whole World Waiting For Learnings UK Races Ahead With Vaccine, Whole World Waiting For Learnings Britain is ahead of most countries in the vaccination race, but it is gambling that it can extend the interval between two doses to stretch limited supplies.
Updated: January 27, 2021 11:32 am IST
As of Monday, almost 6.6 million people in the UK had gotten the first of two doses of a vaccine
London:
Britain is now, essentially, one big, high-stakes science experiment.
It is putting vaccines to the test amid one of the world s worst coronavirus outbreaks, propelled by a variant of the virus that is more contagious and possibly more deadly than the original.
Quarantine time after contact with a confirmed COVID-19 case could potentially be reduced to 7 days without raising the risk of onward transmission of the virus by testing people on the seventh day of quarantine with either a PCR or lateral flow antigen (LFA) test, findings from an English modelling study published today in
The Lancet Public Health journal suggest.
The study, which accounts for infected people’s potential viral load and the sensitivity of COVID-19 tests, estimates that people who test negative after 7 days of quarantine are unlikely to be infectious and could potentially be released without raising the risk of onward virus transmission above what would be expected by quarantining for 14 days without testing.
Next generation child health in a pandemic era The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), together with Takeda Pharmaceutical Company, invite you to this exclusive webinar.
In 2019, Takeda partnered with LSHTM to support the first Takeda Chair in Global Child Health at LSHTM, to enable more children to survive and thrive. With Takeda’s support, LSHTM is proud to have recruited Professor Debra Jackson, a leading academic in child health, to join LSHTM and our Maternal, Adolescent, Reproductive and Child Health (MARCH) Centre.
We are delighted to invite you to our exclusive webinar. Professor Peter Piot, Director of LSHTM, and Dr Rajeev Venkayya President of the Global Vaccine Business Unit at Takeda, will introduce Professor Debra Jackson to speak about her work. Professor Debra Jackson will be joined by Professor Joy Lawn, Director of the MARCH Centre, and together they will explore a number of topics including:
The R value has sunk below one for the first time since the third lockdown was introduced, official figures have revealed, in the first formal signal that the new restrictions are suppressing the virus.
But how is it calculated? Is it reliable? And how does it vary across regions of the UK?
What is the R rate?
The reproduction, or R rate, is the number of people that a single infected person will go on to infect.
Anything above one, means that each person will be passing the virus on to more than one person allowing the epidemic to grow exponentially.