LOS ANGELES – The California state epidemiologist is calling for the suspension of more than 300,000 coronavirus vaccinations using a version of the Moderna vaccine because some people have received medical treatment for possible serious allergic reactions.
Dr. Erica S. Pan recommended on Sunday that providers stop using the 41L20A lot of Moderna vaccine pending the completion of an investigation by state officials, Moderna, the US Centers for Disease Control and the Food and Drug Administration federal.
“Out of extreme caution and also recognizing the extremely limited supply of vaccine, we are recommending that providers use another available vaccine stock,” said Pan in a statement.
She said more than 330,000 doses of the batch arrived in California between January 5 and 12 and were distributed to 287 providers.
Less than 10 people, who received the vaccine at the same location in the community, needed medical attention for a 24-hour period, Pan said. No other similar group was found.
Pan did not specify the number of cases involved or where they occurred.
However, six health professionals in San Diego had allergic reactions to vaccines they received at a mass vaccination center on January 14. The site has been temporarily closed and is now using other vaccines, KTGV-TV reported.
Modern MRNA,
in a statement, said the company “is not aware of comparable adverse events from other vaccination centers that may have administered vaccines from the same batch”.
The CDC said that COVID-19 vaccines can cause side effects for a few days, which include fever, chills, headache, swelling or tiredness, “which are normal signs that your body is building protection.”
However, serious reactions are extremely rare. Pan said in a vaccine similar to Moderna, the rate of anaphylaxis – in which an immune system reaction can block breathing and drop blood pressure – was about 1 in 100,000.
The announcement was made while California counties continue to beg for more COVID-19 vaccine as the state tries to reduce its infection rate, leading to a record number of hospitalizations and deaths.
California, with a population of 40 million, dispatched about 3.2 million doses of the vaccine – which requires two doses for complete immunization – to local health departments and health systems, the state Department of Public Health reported. on Monday.
Only about 1.4 million of these doses, or about 40%, have been administered.
So far. the state vaccinated less than 2,500 people per 100,000 residents, a rate that is well below the national average, according to federal data.
Although Governor Gavin Newsom announced last week that anyone aged 65 and over would be eligible to start receiving the vaccine, Los Angeles County and a few others said they did not have enough doses to vaccinate so many people and were focusing first. vaccinating health care workers and the most vulnerable elderly people living in nursing homes.
On Monday, the Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent sent a letter to state and local public health officials requesting authorization to provide COVID-19 vaccines in schools to staff, members of the local community, and students, since a vaccine for children has been approved.
“This will help to reopen schools as quickly as possible and in the safest possible way,” wrote Superintendent Austin Beutner.
California is close to 3 million cases of coronavirus and more than 33,600 people have died since the pandemic began last year, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
The death rate for COVID-19 in Los Angeles County – the most populous in the country and the epicenter of the state pandemic – amounts 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 deal with the accumulation of bodies in hospitals and funeral homes.
“The current death rate is more than double the pre-pandemic years,” said the agency.
On average, California has seen about 500 deaths and 40,000 new cases per day for the past two weeks. Although hospitalizations and hospitalizations in intensive care units remained in a slight downward trend, the authorities warned that this could be reversed when the full impact of transmissions during the Christmas and New Year holidays is felt.
“As the number of cases continues to increase in California, the total number of individuals who will have serious consequences will also increase,” the state health department said in a statement on Monday.
To raise concerns, California is experimenting with new and possibly more communicable forms of COVID-19.
The state health department announced on Sunday that an L452R variant of the virus is increasingly appearing in the genetic sequencing of COVID-19 test samples from several counties.
The variant was first identified last year in California and other states and countries, but has been identified more frequently since November and in several major outbreaks in Northern California’s Santa Clara County, the department said.
Overall, the variant has been found in at least a dozen counties. In some places. tests 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 at San Francisco.
However, not all test samples receive genetic sequencing to identify variants, so their frequency was not immediately clear.
However, health officials said the disease was linked to an outbreak at Christmas time at Kaiser Permanente San Jose that infected at least 89 employees and patients, killing a receptionist. The outbreak was attributed to an employee who visited the hospital’s emergency room wearing an air-powered inflatable Christmas tree costume.
The variant is different from another mutation, B117, which was first reported in the UK and appears to spread much more easily, although it does not appear to make people sicker.
This variant has already appeared in San Diego County and Los Angeles County announced over the weekend that it had detected its first case.