From Bombay to Bogota, tens of millions of people are facing new lockdowns and curfews this weekend, while already hesitant COVID vaccination campaigns in Europe face shortages and fears of Side effects.
While the number of new contaminations is soaring in India (+132,000 in 24 hours), the state of Maharashtra, the most affected by the second wave of coronavirus, is confined on Saturday for the whole weekend, a measure that affects 125 million of people and will be repeated every weekend throughout the month of April.
“I am not at all in favor of containment, but I do not believe that the government has other options”, notes Neha Tyagi, 27, in Bombay, lamenting that the population “does not take the virus seriously”. State hospitals were forced to stop vaccinations on Friday for lack of doses.
The eight million inhabitants of Bogota, Colombia, will also have to confine themselves this weekend, announced the mayor of the capital Claudia Lopez. Colombia is the second country most affected by the epidemic in Latin America behind Brazil, with nearly 2.5 million cases.
Argentina, also suffering from an exponential increase in contamination, has been under curfew for three weeks since Friday.
“In the last seven days alone, cases have increased by 36% nationwide and 53% in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires,” lamented President Alberto Fernandez.
Vascular problems?
In Europe, where the third wave is hitting many countries hard, the already slow vaccination campaign is encountering new questions about the side effects potentially linked to the sera from Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and AstraZeneca.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced Friday to examine a possible link between J & J’s vaccine and cases of blood clots, and to expand its investigation into that of AstraZeneca, already implicated for the same kind of symptoms, to vascular problems.
On Wednesday, the EMA had recognized that blood clots should be listed as a side effect, “very rare”, but serious, of the AstraZeneca vaccine, especially in young subjects.
She said on Friday that she had launched a study of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, for similar side effects, after four cases were reported, including one fatal. The EU has cleared this vaccine, but has not started using it.
In addition, the EMA is also investigating possible links between AstraZeneca and vascular problems: it announced Friday to examine five cases of a capillary leak syndrome, “characterized by the leakage of fluid from the blood vessels, causing the tissue swelling and a drop in blood pressure ”.
For its part, its American counterpart, the FDA, announced Friday that it had not established a “causal link” at this stage between the formation of blood clots and the injection of the J&J vaccine. “We will keep the public informed when we learn more,” she said.
The two vaccines, Johnson & Johnson like AstraZeneca, use the same technology using an adenovirus as a vector.
Mistrust
In the immediate term, mistrust of the AstraZeneca vaccine has prompted many countries to set age limits for its use, or even to suspend its use.
For example, it is reserved for over 30s in the United Kingdom, where it has been widely used, over 65s in Sweden, and over 60s in the Philippines, Portugal, the Netherlands or Germany, which is now considering buying the controversial Sputnik V from Russia.
The Spanish region of Castile and León and Denmark have completely discontinued the use of the AstraZeneca.
And Hong Kong suspended Friday, to “avoid any waste”, its order of AstraZeneca, fearing side effects and its ineffectiveness against new variants of the coronavirus.
On Friday, before the EMA’s announcements, the French health authorities had indicated that the 533,000 people under the age of 55 already vaccinated with a first dose of AstraZeneca would be offered for the 2nd dose a different messenger RNA vaccine, that from Pfizer / BioNTech or from Moderna.
But soon after, the World Health Organization (WHO) repeated that it could not recommend a change in the anti-Covid vaccine between two doses, for lack of “adequate data” at this stage.
The effectiveness of vaccines also remains uncertain in the face of variants of the coronavirus.
Anxious to anticipate this problem, the EU will launch negotiations to order 1.8 billion additional doses of so-called “2nd generation” vaccines against Covid-19, with a binding delivery schedule, told AFP a source at the European Commission.
Anticipation seems all the more necessary as AstraZeneca, already at the center of controversies with the EU over its delivery delays, for example indicated on Friday that it would be late on half of its deliveries this week in the ‘European Union.
In contrast to AstraZeneca’s problems, the Pfizer / BioNTech alliance has taken a new step forward by filing in the United States on Friday a request for authorization of its vaccine for adolescents aged 12 to 15 years.
Tighten the anti-COVID law
In Germany, the government will toughen pandemic legislation next week, so it can impose restrictions on the whole country.
In Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called the progression of the third wave “worrying” and called for “tougher measures” in several parts of the country.
In Brazil, whose hospitals are in a “critical” situation in the face of the influx of patients, the Supreme Court has ordered the Senate to set up a commission of inquiry to assess the management of the pandemic by the government of the president of far right Jair Bolsonaro.
The pandemic has infected more than 133,908,150 people and killed at least 2,903,907 people worldwide since the end of 2019, according to an AFP count on Friday.