SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea will authorize the use of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine for people aged 65 and over, Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said on Thursday, a measure that will allow the country to increase its immunization campaign.
The country has been launching the vaccine since the last week of February, starting with the elderly and health professionals, but excluded more than 370,000 people over 65 in nursing homes, citing the lack of data from clinical trials on the age group .
Britain’s real-world data now shows that vaccines from AstraZeneca, Pfizer and BioNTech are more than 80% effective in preventing hospitalizations over 80 years after an injection.
“Vaccination has been delayed for those 65 and older due to a lack of evidence to determine the effectiveness of the AstraZeneca vaccine, but recently, data to prove its effectiveness for the elderly has been released in the UK,” said Chung at a government meeting.
South Korea will begin inoculating 376,000 patients and staff aged 65 and over in nursing hospitals and other facilities this month, said Kwon Jun-wook, an official at the Korean Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA), in a press conference.
Kwon said he hoped that this age group, which has seen the majority of reported deaths, would reach the herd’s immunity levels by the end of September.
Health officials also added about 20,000 flight attendants to the list of vaccine recipients in the second quarter, as they were vulnerable to more transmissible variants and were exempt from self-quarantine.
South Korea has so far reported a total of 257 new variants of the virus, 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 would be launched from the last week of May, with 7 million of Pfizer’s product by June. KDCA is in negotiations with Moderna and Johnson & Johnson to import its vaccines in the second quarter.
The KDCA said that 500,635 people received the first dose of the AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines on Wednesday. South Korea reported 465 new cases of COVID-19 on Wednesday, bringing the total to 94,198 infections, with 1,652 deaths.
Reporting by Sangmi Cha; Stephen Coates edition