The health authorities will continue to give AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine to people aged under 55, despite the World Health Organisation backing its use for the elderly.
WHO vaccine experts said on Wednesday the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine could be used for those over the age of 65 based on “the totality of available evidence”.
The EU’s drugs regulator has approved the vaccine for all adults but each member state is responsible for its own rollout policy.
Germany, Austria and France have all recommended it to be limited to under 65s in recent weeks, while Malta has gone a step further. Health Minister Chris Fearne has said the AstraZeneca jab will only be delivered to non-medical frontliners aged under 55 at this stage.
The restriction is due to insufficient data on the vaccine’s efficacy for older people.
Times of Malta is informed that although the health ministry has taken note of the WHO’s position, for now, the position remains unchanged.
On Wednesday, the WHO’s 15-member Strategic Advisory Group of Experts on Immunisation acknowledged there was a lack of data on the efficacy of the vaccine for those aged over 65.
But its chief Alejandro Cravioto said: “We feel that the response of this group cannot be any different from groups of a younger age.” Malta is in the process of receiving AstraZeneca doses, with the first consignment of an eventual one million doses arriving on Sunday.
How many doses given out?
Malta is ahead of all other EU member states when it comes to its vaccine rollout, according to data by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
The country’s national uptake – the number of doses administered compared to the size of the population – remains the highest. As of Thursday, this rate stood at 7.6 per cent. Austria had the second-highest rate at 5.4 per cent.
The number of doses distributed to Malta was also the highest in all of the EU, with 14.4 doses per hundred people handed out. Austria once again followed, with 8.4 vaccines per 100 inhabitants given.
Since the beginning of the vaccination drive, on December 27, a total of 44,598 doses have been administered, with 12,928 people receiving the second jab. An exercise by Times of Malta using publicly available data shows the daily number of first doses ranges from lows of just over 500 doses to highs of more than 1,000 doses.
On Friday last week, for instance, 1,062 first doses were administered while the number was down to just 502 first jabs on Sunday.