Greece’s slow-rolling vaccination program against COVID-19 has been ramping up and now will give priority to people with multiple or underlying conditions after the government said it would continue to use the AstraZeneca version after other countries stopped to study side effects.
Greece on March 19 will open an online platform to book vaccines for those eligible if they have prior conditions set by the government’s health ministry, which includes 417,000 people with transplants, kidney failure, cystic fibrosis, cancer patients, people with chronic respiratory diseases, heart or liver disease, or patients in immunosuppression.
The emvolio.gov.gr platform for the group will open on at 6 p.m. that day,
Maria Theodoridouso, head of the National Vaccination Committee told a regular briefing which also said AstraZeneca would continue being given.
Theodoridou said there is no evidence connecting the few incidents of dangerous blood clots in some recipients to the vaccine and warned people not to take anticoagulants before getting a vaccination.
Only a little more than one million of Greece’s population of 10.7 million has been inoculated, with a benchmark of 70 percent, or 7.49 million, needed to make the vaccinations slow the pandemic.
Greece began by using vaccines from the team of the US pharmaceutical giant Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech as well as Moderna, from Cambridge, Massachusetts adjacent to Boston.
Those require two shots three weeks apart but the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines have to be kept at ultra-cold conditions of minus 70 degrees Celsius (-158 Fahrenheit) compared to Moderna’s -20 Celsius (58 degrees Fahrenheit.)
AstraZeneca’s version, produced in the United Kingdom, can be stored at 2-8 Celsius (35.6-42.8 Fahrenheit) but there was no word whether that could cause any problems after reports of 37 cases of blood clotting among 17 million shots.
Prosecutors in the northern Italian region of Piedmont said they had seized a batch of 393,600 shots of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine following the death of a 57-year-old music teacher hours after he was inoculated, said Reuters.
Read more at thenationalherald.com
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