SEOUL: Some 760,000 South Koreans who have received a first dose of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine will be offered Pfizer’s vaccine as a second shot due to shipment delays by global vaccine sharing scheme COVAX, the government said.
Several countries, including Canada and Spain, have already approved such dose-mixing mainly due to concerns about rare and potentially fatal blood clots linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine.
A Spanish study found that giving a dose of the Pfizer shot to people who already received the AstraZeneca vaccine is highly safe and effective, according to preliminary results.
Some 835,000 doses of the AstraZeneca’s vaccine from COVAX were scheduled to arrive by the end of June, which South Korea planned to use mainly as a second shot for around 760,000 health and frontline workers who had received their first dose in April.
The shipment is delayed to July or later, while the country had used up available AstraZeneca reserves to meet stronger than expected participation in its vaccination campaign which helped the country meet its first-half inoculation target ahead of schedule.
Over 27 percent of its 52 million population have been inoculated with at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine as of Thursday, and the country is on track to meet a target of 70 percent by September and reach herd immunity before November.
The government expects to receive 80 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines in the third quarter including 10 million in July. They are from AstraZeneca, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson and Moderna.
South Korea said last month it will conduct a clinical trial that mixes COVID-19 doses from AstraZeneca with those from Pfizer and others.
It has so far run a trial in 100 health workers to examine the formation of antibody and other immune effects, Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency (KDCA) director Jeong Eun-kyeong told a briefing on Thursday.
South Korea reported 507 new infections by midnight on Thursday, for a tally of 150,238 cases, the KDCA said, with a death toll of 1,996 since the pandemic began.
South Korea to mix-and-match COVID-19 vaccine doses for 760,000 people
https://arab.news/nrt5q
South Korea to mix-and-match COVID-19 vaccine doses for 760,000 people
- Several countries have already approved such dose-mixing mainly due to concerns about rare and potentially fatal blood clots
- Over 27 percent of its 52 million population have been inoculated with at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccine
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
