The advice is almost identical to that issued by the expert panel for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine last month and comes as both are suspected of causing a new and exceedingly rare blood-clotting syndrome.
"The viral-vector vaccines are very effective vaccines, but there is a safety signal, a safety risk," NACI vice-chair Dr.
"And the issue with the safety signal is that although it's very rare, it is very serious. And so individuals need to have an informed choice to be vaccinated with the first vaccine that's available, or to wait for an mRNA vaccine. They need to be aware that those are the options available to them."
The advice, like that given for
"Get whatever vaccine is available to you, it's that simple,"
"The longer you wait to get vaccinated, the longer you're not protected."
At the time, Sharma was giving an update on
Deeks said the issue is not whether one vaccine is better at preventing COVID-19, but the fact that two vaccines have this known safety risk, and the mRNA vaccines do not.
She said it is up to every person to decide how much they can tolerate the extra risk the viral-vector vaccines bring, their risk of getting COVID-19, and whether the risk of waiting to get an mRNA vaccine outweighs the risk of potentially getting a blood clot from the vaccines by
"If someone's working from home, not really going out, in a province or territory where there's not much disease, then they're in a very different situation than somebody that works in, let's say, a manufacturing plant, has some difficulty wearing PPE, and in a province that has a very high burden of disease," said Deeks.
She said provinces might want to prioritize the J&J doses for people who are harder to book for a second dose, because J&J is so far the only single-dose vaccine approved in
Pregnant women are advised to avoid it because the treatments for VITT are more difficult for a woman during pregnancy, she said.
Conservative health critic
Health Minister
The risk of vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia, or VITT, is estimated to be anywhere from one case in 100,000 doses given, to one in 250,000, but the syndrome is so new, there is still little known about what the real risk is, why it is happening and who might be more likely to develop than syndrome than others.
Seven cases have been reported to date in
Both
So far in
Deeks said NACI is set to provide advice on whether a second dose of a different vaccine can be offered but is waiting for clinical trials testing combinations of vaccines to be completed. Some data is expected on that this month.
She said as of right now there is no reason people should avoid getting their second dose of
This report by
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