Health News at Your Fingertips

Adults under 30 should be offered an alternative vaccine instead of the AstraZeneca jab if there is one available in their area and they are healthy and not at high risk of Covid, the UK government’s vaccination advisory body has said. My colleague Sarah Boseley has the story here.

This is what Boris Johnson said to reporters about the AstraZeneca vaccine during his visit to Cornwall. He said:

I think the crucial thing on this is to listen to what the scientists, and the doctors, the medical experts, have to say. The MHRA is meeting, the JCVI is meeting, they’ll be setting out the position and we will get on with rolling out the vaccine and obviously we’ll follow very carefully what they have to say.

I don’t think anything that I have seen leads me to suppose that we will have to change the road map or deviate from the road map in any way.

Johnson said the vaccine was “safe”. He went on:

But the crucial thing for everybody is to listen to what the scientists, the medical experts have to say later on today.

You can really start to see some of the benefits of that – it’s pretty clear that the decline in the number of deaths, the decline in the number of hospitalisations is being fuelled, is being assisted, the steepness of that decline is being helped by the roll-out of the vaccines so it’s very important for everybody to continue to get your second jab when you’re asked to come forward for your turn.

Boris Johnson has been speaking about the AstraZeneca vaccine on a visit to Cornwall. According to the Mail’s John Stevens, Johnson has stressed it is safe.

(PR experts may be wondering why Johnson is commenting at the very moment when the scientists are about the deliver a news conference. It is generally accepted that public health messages have more credibility when delivered by experts, not politicians.)

The EMA press conference is starting now. My colleague Rhi Storer is covering it on our global coronavirus live blog. It’s here.

We don’t know what the MHRA will be saying yet, but it seems likely that their recommendations will mirror those of the EMA.

From my colleague Aubrey Allegretti:

From Darren McCaffrey from GB News

From Reuters’ Guy Faulconbridge

The joint press conference for the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the Joint Committee for Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) is about to start.

Here is the list of people due to be speaking.

Prof Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer for England

Dr June Raine, chief executive of the MHRA

Sir Munir Pirmohamed, chair of the Committee of Human Medicines (which advises the government on the safety of medicines)

Prof Wei Shen Lim, chair of the JCVI

Although regulators in some European countries have changed their advice about the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in the light of concerns about a possible link with blood clots, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency has until now insisted that people should keep taking the jab because the benefits far outweigh the risks.

But on 18 March the MHRA did issue new guidance, after five cases of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) – an extremely rare blood clot in the brain – occurred in the 11 million people who had at that point had the vaccine.

Here is the news release the MHRA put out at the time. And here is an extract.

Given the extremely rare rate of occurrence of these CSVT events among the 11 million people vaccinated, and as a link to the vaccine is unproven, the benefits of the vaccine in preventing Covid-19, with its associated risk of hospitalisation and death, continue to outweigh the risks of potential side effects …

While we continue to investigate these cases, as a precautionary measure we would advise anyone with a headache that lasts for more than 4 days after vaccination, or bruising beyond the site of vaccination after a few days, to seek medical attention.

(CVST and CSVT are the same thing – both terms are in use.)

At the end of last week MHRA issued an update. It said by 24 March there had been 22 reports of CVST, and eight reports of thrombosis events with low platelets, out of a total of 18.1m AstraZeneca doses delivered at that point.