By Mahlon Meyer NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
Dr. Crystal Wong (Photo courtesy of UW Medicine)
Virtually every time a patient comes in, Crystal Wong, a board-certified family medicinephysicianand an associatemedicaldirector atUniversity of Washington (UW) Medicine, carries out the same conversation.
Ive literally had hundreds of conversations about getting the new COVID-19 vaccine. Its something that we offer to every single patient that walks through our doors at the clinic, said Wong, comparing it to the conversation she has with patients about the flu shot.
In the end, the response boils down to one of three things.
They either say they want the COVID vaccine, or theyre not interested, or they dont know. If they dont want it, I ask why, and then hear out their concerns, she said.
In the end, only 10-20% of her patients opt out, after having the conversation.
But as Wong prepared last week for her next clinic, the conversation would become more urgent.
Wong had just received an urgent notification from the UW Medical Center.
The emergency room was full.
Do what you can to keep people out of the ER, it said.
The pandemic should have been over by now, thats almost everyones expectation. And officially it is. Thats partially why vaccination rates are so low, even in a state that had among the highest vaccination rates in the country.
As of Jan. 14, only 17% of Washingtonians had been inoculated with the new formula adjusted to cope with mutations in SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, according to the Department of Health.
That is abysmally low compared with a rate of 76% of people in this state whove had at least one shot of the old formula.
Wong, in an interview with Northwest Asian Weekly, said it is not typically concerns about the new formula that have prompted people to shy away from getting the new shot.
If youre a staunch non-believer in vaccines, it is very difficult for us to argue with you. Weve been having this conversation for years now, and theres not really a lot of new things coming up in the conversation.
Rather, among her patients, its more an issue of convenience, for those who have the means and time to see a doctor, and barriers for those who dont.
Its basically the pros and cons approach, she said. In addition, there is obviously less concern about COVID in the media. Wong shared that many are seeing COVID-19 like a normal cold as opposed to something that could be very deadly.
When people consider the cons of getting the COVID-19 vaccines, the biggest thing she hears is that the vaccine shots have side effects that make them sick. This, together with the idea that COVID-19 is not that serious, is making them not want to get it.
And thats where the conversation comes in.
After she hears out the concerns of those who are inclined against the vaccine, she responds with nuance.
I just say that from an individual perspective, you could be protecting yourself from something that hopefully is just a nuisance, but is a nuisance nonetheless, she said.
She also raises the bad outcomes, such as potential hospitalization, death, or long COVID, that many people may not think about.
Finally, she adds, that by getting vaccinated, From the community perspective, you are doing a public service by decreasing the spread.
For others, who may not have the means to see a doctor, lack health insurance, or have no time for an appointment, its a question of barriers.
Everyone cares about their health. No one wants to get sick, she said.
Another factor is the change in the way vaccines have been delivered. During the height of the pandemic, they were more accessible.
The federal government put so much effort into making the COVID vaccine incredibly accessible when it was direly important that we got people vaccinated, and its [the] ease of access to anything that really impacts how many people will get it, she said. Now, we dont have the same mass vaccine sites, we dont have the same outreach to employers, or such things that happened early on in the pandemic or even mid pandemic or even late pandemic, and I think a lot of people feel they have to seek it out if they want the vaccine.
The remedy? Make all health care, not just vaccines, more accessible.
Access to all healthcare should be excellent, especially for people that have a lot of barriers, she said. And there are some things that it would be easier to facilitate easy access than other things and vaccines are a great example.
There are resources that help bring up the level of accessibility for COVID-19 vaccines, such as the Bridge Access Program, Vaccines for Children Program, vaccine clinics, and support provided by local community organizations. So it is a matter of sharing this information with the community and making sure it reaches the ones that need to know about it.
On the other hand, not everything is possible.
I do wish that we had more resources at our fingertips to do bigger public health outreach for things that are really common and really impactful.
One thing that Wong does not do is resort to scare tactics.
Although shes had many patients and colleagues debilitated by long COVIDsome having to quit their jobs and go on disabilityshe wont exaggerate the risk to get people vaccinated using fear.
Mahlon can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.
Made possible in part by the Washington State Department of Health through a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This information does not necessarily reflect the official policies of the Washington State Department of Health or the Department of Health and Human Services.
If youve presented the same arm for every dose of a particular vaccine, you may want to reconsider. Alternating arms may produce a more powerful immune response, a new study suggests.
The researchers studied responses to the first two doses of Covid-19 vaccines. Those who alternated arms showed a small increase in immunity over those who got both doses in the same arm.
For individuals who respond poorly to vaccines because of age or health conditions, even a small boost may turn out to be significant, the researchers said. At this point in the pandemic, with most people having had multiple vaccine doses or infections, alternating arms for Covid vaccines may not offer much benefit.
Yet if confirmed by further study, the results could have implications for all multidose vaccines, including childhood immunizations.
Im not making recommendations at this point, because we need to understand this a lot better, said Dr. Marcel E. Curlin, an infectious disease physician at Oregon Health & Science University who led the work.
But all things being equal, we ought to consider switching up the arms.
The few studies comparing the two approaches have been small and have produced mixed results. And none of the studies shown a big difference in immunity.
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PULASKI, Tenn. (WKRN) The son of a grieving mother is being used as a poster child on anti-vaccine sites and she wants to clear up the false accusations.
Janaye Creecy said several websites are using her story and family photos for political use, insinuating her son died from the COVID-vaccine.
The Pulaski mother found the unsettling posts as she made plans to bury her child while still waiting on an autopsy to find out why 15-year-old Quinton Cox died.
He was the most kind and gentle person that anybody could ever meet. He had a beautiful heart, everybody saw it, Creecy said while looking at a painting she made of her son.
Through a paint brush, Creecy found some peace making a portrait of her child.
Now that I look at it, I realize I painted him sad and, you know, the picture didnt have an emotion, but the sadness kind of shows, she explained.
Her emotion shines through the watercolors after she found Quinton in his bedroom on Jan. 27.
When I went in, I thought he had fell asleep in his chair, but, unfortunately, that was not the case, Creecy said, adding he was still holding his video game controller and wearing his headphones.
Still unsure of how her son died, Creecy posted about her loss on her personal Facebook page.
About a day after I made the post, I started noticing some really bizarre comments, and they were talking about the vaccine and how I should have known better than to give my child the vaccine and implying that it was my fault that he died because of that, and I had no idea where it was coming from at first. I was like, Where is this coming from? I know my friends arent posting this. I dont know these people. Some of them, I looked at their pages and they were from New Zealand and Canada and all sorts of places, Creecy said.
As she looked further into where the comments were coming from, she found several anti-vaccine websites were using a photo of her son wearing a mask, along with a picture of her insinuating the COVID-vaccine was to blame for Quintons death.
We started Googling once we saw the first article and realized that it was on X, it was on Telegraph, it was on, oh God, there were so many. There were so many that we pulled up where it was being shared and reposted and commented on, and it was just horrible to know that somebodys taking that story about you and your child and using it to try to scare people when they dont know anything about what happened, she explained.
Deepening the heartache, Creecy said Quintons father died from COVID-19 complications in 2020.
First I was angry because I know how angry my son would be at the idea that they were using his picture for that, but then it was just heartbreaking as well because there were so many posts coming to say mean, hurtful things at the worst time in my life. There is nothing, nothing worse for a parent than losing a child. Theres no pain deeper than that, and then to have people tell you that its your fault, that you did something, I cant imagine how people could do that, she said. Nobody should have to bury their child, but also nobody should have to bury their child and be viciously attacked over and over again by people who dont even know you and steal your childs identity to make a political statement of some kind, because its just not the time for that. I cant bring my son back. Theres nothing on the face of this planet that I can do to save him or to help him, but I could speak for him.
Creecy believes her son may have had an enlarged heart, saying he also suffered from sleep apnea. However, she is waiting on an autopsy to uncover exactly how Quinton died.
Florida man bludgeons father to death after learning he got 'the vaccine:' Investigators
by GERSHON HARRELL | WPEC
{p}A man is accused of brutally beating and killing his father because he got a vaccination, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office (PBSO) says. According to the arrest report, the woman who placed the 911 call said she could hear the suspect's father screaming "Stop you are killing me." (PBSO){ }{/p}{p}{/p}
WELLINGTON, Fla. (WPEC)
A Florida man accused of brutally beating and killing his father was upset after learning his dad received "the vaccine," investigators say.
The 911 caller, who is a friend of the family, described the suspect, Brian Mcgann Jr., as a "delusional conspiracy theorist."
WPEC asked the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office (PBSO) what type of vaccine caused the 44-year-old man to become upset with his father.
The caller told investigators Mcgann Jr. had also recently started "using cocaine."
A%20man%20is%20accused%20of%20brutally%20beating%20and%20killing%20his%20father%20because%20he%20got%20a%20vaccination,%20the%20Palm%20Beach%20County%20Sheriff's%20Office%20(PBSO)%20says.%20(WPEC)
According to the arrest report, the woman who placed the 911 call said she could hear the suspect's father, Brian Mcgann Sr., screaming "Stop you are killing me."
The report from PBSO said the call came in around 11:15 p.m. Sunday when deputies responded to the report of a domestic disturbance on Golden Rod Road.
Deputies arrived to find Mcgann Sr. had been attacked and was lying unresponsive on the floor of the living room. The elder Mcgann's face was extremely swollen, battered, and bruised had suffered significant injuries to his face, deputies reported, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
Deputies tracked down the suspect, Mcgann Jr., after following a blood trail from a rear window of the home to a fence, which led them to conclude he had jumped into a neighbor's yard to avoid arrest.
The suspect's hands were swollen, and he was covered in blood, the report stated, leading investigators to conclude he was the man who killed his father.
PBSO interviewed the woman who made the 911 call and told deputies that she had been a family friend of the Mcgann's for years, the sheriff's office said.
She told deputies the younger Mcgann appeared to be intoxicated and paranoid.
The caller said Mcgann Jr. called her at around 12:58 p.m. and they had a three-hour phone conversation, according to the complaint.
The woman said Mcgann Jr. called her back at 10:30 p.m. and asked her to pack her belongings and leave the residence because "He was going to be dead." The arrest report said she found the request strange because she lives in Middleburg, Florida.
At 11:07 p.m. Mcgann Jr. placed another phone call to the woman who said he was pulling into his father's residence, the report said.
The woman claimed Mcgann Jr. called her again at 11:10 p.m. and she could hear him screaming at his father. The report continues, that the altercation continued to get extremely violent and chaotic.
She heard Mcgann say, "He is under my foot."
In the report, the caller said she immediately dialed 911.
Mcgann Jr. faces a first-degree murder charge.
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A child receives a measles vaccination at a clinic in Harare, Zimbabwe, where a 2022 outbreak saw some 700 children die from the highly infectious childhood disease. Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi/AP hide caption
A child receives a measles vaccination at a clinic in Harare, Zimbabwe, where a 2022 outbreak saw some 700 children die from the highly infectious childhood disease.
Measles is on the rise around the world, and even experts who saw it coming say the increase is "staggering."
The World Health Organization said in December that its European region (which extends into parts of western and central Asia) saw an "alarming" increase in measles cases from under a thousand in 2022 to more than 30,000 last year.
John Vertefeuille, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Global Immunization Division, said in a statement that the numbers are "staggering."
The WHO's most recent global numbers, released in November, reveal that measles cases increased worldwide by 18% to about 9 million, and deaths rose 43% to 136,000, in 2022 compared to 2021. Some 32 countries had large, disruptive outbreaks in 2022, and that number ticked up to 51 in 2023, Dr. Natasha Crowcroft, WHO's senior technical adviser for measles and rubella control, told NPR.
The worrying uptick in measles outbreaks and deaths is, "unfortunately, not unexpected given the declining vaccination rates we've seen in the past few years," noted John Vertefeuille of the CDC in his statement. "Urgent, targeted efforts are critical to prevent measles disease and deaths."
Measles is one of the most contagious infectious diseases, and also one of the most preventable: two doses of vaccine in childhood is 97% protective. WHO estimates that some 61 million doses were missed or delayed in 2021. In 2022, about 83% of the world's children received one dose of measles vaccine by their first birthday the lowest proportion since 2008, when the rate was also 83%.
"We're going to see outbreaks any time we have an accumulation of people who haven't been vaccinated," says Cyndi Hatcher, unit lead for measles elimination in the African Region at the CDC. "When you have immunization disruptions, measles is always going to be one of the first epidemics that you see."
Low-income countries continue to have the lowest vaccination rates five sub-Saharan African countries have rates below 50% for the first dose.
"Measles is called the inequity virus for good reason. It is the disease that will find and attack those who aren't protected," says Dr. Kate O'Brien, WHO director for immunization, vaccine and biologicals.
In Ethiopia, for example, conflict and weaknesses in the rural health system have taken a toll on vaccination rates, says Dr. Ngozi Kennedy, UNICEF's Ethiopia health manager.
"We have a lot of pastoral communities that are often on the move so they may not know how to, or may not be able to, get to health centers for the vaccine. Also, as a result of the protracted conflicts, services are often disrupted with populations and even some health-care workers being displaced," she says.
Children who don't get their vaccines on schedule are at risk of death and serious illness, particularly children under age 5 who are at highest risk for severe complications including pneumonia, encephalitis (brain swelling) and death. Measles can also put children at higher risk for other potentially fatal childhood diseases such as diarrheal diseases and meningitis because the virus can cause the immune system to forget its learned defenses against other pathogens.
"I think that people may have forgotten how dangerous measles can be if they haven't seen cases before," Hatcher says.
But global health experts didn't forget, and many predicted that outbreaks would be coming.
"During the pandemic, when everything was locked down, there wasn't much measles being spread ... because no one was going anywhere," says WHO measles and rubella senior technical adviser Dr. Natasha Crowcroft. "It's the usual human thing that no one does anything until the problem starts. It's really hard to sell prevention."
Last year a coalition including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, launched "The Big Catch-Up" an effort to get vaccination rates back up to at least their pre-pandemic levels. (Editor's note: The Gates Foundation is one of the funders of NPR and this blog.)
Kennedy says efforts continue in Ethiopia to shore up vaccination rates. Health workers there have begun to track childhood immunizations electronically in hopes of keeping more children current, and the country has prioritized 14 "equity zones" to catch kids up on their shots.
But the CDC's Cyndi Hatcher says much more needs to be done.
"I think we need to be very honest with ourselves at the global level," she says. "Are we truly committed to making [measles] a public health priority and do we have the resources that we need to make full immunization a reality at the global level, the regional level but especially at the country and community level?"
Fran Kritz is a health policy reporter based in Washington, D.C., and a regular contributor to NPR. She also reports for the Washington Post and Verywell Health. Find her on X (Twitter): @fkritz
GSK has announced that its respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine has been accepted for priority review by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for use in adults aged 50 to 59 years who are at an increased risk for RSV disease.
If approved, Arexvy would be the first vaccine available to help protect this patient population.
RSV is a common contagious virus characterised by several mild, cold-like symptoms. Although most people can recover within a week or two, certain populations are at a higher risk for severe disease, such as older adults, the immunocompromised and those with underlying medical conditions.
Arexvy has already been approved in the US, Europe and several other countries to protect adults aged 60 years and older against RSV-caused lower respiratory tract disease (LRTD).
GSKs application to extend the indication is supported by results from a late-stage trial evaluating the immune response and safety of Arexvy in adults aged 50 to 59 years, including those at increased risk for RSV-LRTD due to underlying medical conditions.
The company recently shared positive results from the trial, which showed that Arexvy elicited an immune response in this population, including those with chronic pulmonary disease, cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, liver disease or diabetes, that was non-inferior to that observed in adults aged 60 and above.
The co-primary endpoint was also met for the broader group of adults in this age group, GSK said in the October readout, adding that safety and reactogenicity data was consistent with results from the initial phase 3 programme of Arexvy.
Final results from the trial will be presented at an upcoming medical conference and the company has outlined that the data will be submitted to other regulators to support potential label expansions.
GSK used a priority review voucher to reduce the FDAs review period for the expanded use of Arexvy by four months, with the regulator set to make a final decision in June this year.
GSKs original application for the use of Arexvy in adults aged 60 years and older was supported by positive results from its phase 3 AReSVi-006 trial, in which the vaccine showed 82.6% overall efficacy against RSV-LRTD in this age group.
In 2000, thanks to an effective vaccine with high uptake, the U.S. achieved a rare public health victory: zero cases of endemic measles transmission. But measles has persisted, with repeated outbreaks over the years, and it is having a big comeback. In the U.S., 23 cases of measles were reported over less than eight weeks in December and January, including seven cases brought in by international travelers and two outbreaks each involving more than five people. There was a thirtyfold increase in measles cases in Europe in 2023, with tens of thousands of hospitalizations and five deaths.
There was a thirtyfold increase of measles cases in Europe in 2023, with tens of thousands of hospitalizations and five deaths.
How did it get this bad? On top of pre-existing vaccine hesitancy and a thriving machine of misinformation and disinformation spread easily on social media, the Covid-19 pandemic led to supply chain and delivery interruptions and decreased access to routine primary and preventive care. Health budgets and personnel normally devoted to things such as community vaccination efforts were tied up in pandemic-related efforts. And in places where much of the care shifted to telehealth, that convenience also removed the opportunity to administer vaccines in the course of routine in-person visits.
Exemptions from vaccination play a significant role in outbreaks of preventable diseases like measles. While all states allow exemptions for medical reasons, and most allow religious exemptions, the area of greatest growth is in nonmedical, nonreligious, or personal, exemptions, which open the door for outbreaks.
Measles is a pretty terrible virus. Of those who become infected, 1 in 5 will need hospitalization, 1 in 20 will develop pneumonia and 1 in 1,000 will develop encephalitis (inflammation of the brain), and as many as 1 to 3 in 1,000 will die from these complications. Measles infection is dangerous during pregnancy, leading to miscarriage, low birth weight and preterm labor. It also has a terrifying late-term complication, subacute sclerosing panencephalitis, a fatal condition that can strike as late as a decade after the initial infection.
Measles is also highly contagious one person with measles can transmit the disease to 90% of the incompletely vaccinated or immunocompromised they come into close contact with. To prevent outbreaks of the virus, 95% of people in a community need to be vaccinated against it. When we have a suspected or confirmed case in the hospital, the patient is placed in an isolation room that meets specific ventilation requirements and can be accessed only by those who are wearing N95 respirators and are immunized against the virus.
But out in the world, that same person can spread disease rapidly to those around them, especially in places where there are pockets of unvaccinated people and very young children (who wont have completed the vaccine series yet). On Friday, a measles case in an infant was confirmed in San Diego, and according to the public notice announcing the case, the infected infant was taken to a restaurant, a park, a pediatricians office and then an emergency department. Others were potentially exposed at each of those locations.
High vaccination rates, such as those that once eradicated measles in our country, can mean a loss of generational memory of thediseases we defeated. At its peak in the 1950s, there were 3 million to 4 million cases of measles every year; it was transparently bad. As the disease disappeared, its specter did, too, meaning purported harms of vaccines, particularly for those receiving readily available misinformation or disinformation, seemed to be riskier than the forgotten disease. We need to raise the collective consciousness about the consequences of nonvaccination and the very serious nature of outbreaks to boost vaccination rates.
High vaccination rates, such as those that once eradicated measles in our country, can mean a loss of generational memory of the diseases we defeated.
Disturbingly, things appear to be trending in the wrong direction. Mississippi has had one of the highest vaccination rates in the country, with 99% of children fully vaccinated. In 1979, the states Supreme Court struck down religious exemptions to school immunization requirements because the overriding and compelling public interest of protecting children from the horrors of diseases against which means of immunization are known and have long been practiced successfully. For 40 years, Mississippi hasnt had a single case of measles that originated within the state. (But in August, a religious exemption was granted, and health officials expect that remarkable record will end.)
Ten states have now reached exemption rates that make it impossible for them to reach their needed vaccination goals against measles. That is, even if 100% of the nonexempt children in a state get vaccinated, it will still be impossible for the state to reach an overall 95% vaccination rate against the virus.
There are a variety of approaches states have implemented to allow exemptions but ensure they remain relatively rare, leaving room for herd immunity. They include strengthening requirements for exemptions, incorporating parental education about the risks of not vaccinating into the process and ensuring transparency about high rates of exemptions in schools and programs. Some states have special provisions that exclude unvaccinated children from school or prohibit exemptions during active outbreaks.
Limiting exemptions must be paired with increasing vaccine and vaccine information accessibility. This includes continuing to expand where and how vaccines can be received, including pharmacist prescribing and administration and schools and child care centers, ongoing widespread community educational efforts and dissemination of in-depth and reliable information about vaccines.
Classic symptoms of the infection include the 3 Cs: cough, coryza (runny nose) and conjunctivitis.
Early recognition of measles is also important. Classic symptoms of the infection include the 3 Cs: cough, coryza (runny nose) and conjunctivitis; high fever; blue-white spots inside the mouth (called Koplik spots); and a characteristic rash. Quickly seeking medical attentionwhen cases are suspected allows testing, confirmation of the diagnosis and prevention of further spread. Some people, including infants, those who are immunocompromised and pregnant women, are eligible to receive immune globulin to prevent illness after theyre exposed to someone with measles. Confirming whos been exposed to a verified case allows people in these groups to get medical attention early enough for that preventive treatment.
Parents with young children should make sure theyre up to date on any immunizations that may have been skipped or delayed during the pandemic. Because the majority of cases and outbreaks start with those returning from travel abroad, a planned trip abroad is an especially good time for families to review their routine vaccination status.
Right now, staying safe from measles is complicated by the layered challenges of pre-pandemic vaccine skepticism, pandemic-era setbacks and increased world travel. Itll take a concerted effort to take us back to the kinds of success we achieved two decades ago.
Esther Choo, M.D. M.P.H., is an emergency medicine physician, health policy researcher and founding member of Equity Quotient, a company that advises organizations on building cultures of equity. She has provided commentary on the pandemic and other health care topics through appearances on MSNBC, CNN, the BBC and Yahoo! Finance and editorials published in The Lancet, the British Medical Journal, The Washington Post, NBC Think and USA Today.
This week, I address pushback I received on my Novartis-MorphoSys column. But first, a preview of the expected readout from Gritstone Bios neoantigen cancer vaccine study.
Before the end of the quarter, Gritstone Bio will release preliminary results from a randomized, Phase 2 clinical trial investigating a personalized therapeutic cancer vaccine in microsatellite-stable colon cancer, a type of immunologically cold tumor that is resistant to immunotherapies like PD-1/PD-L1 inhibitors.
The Gritstone vaccine is designed to train a patients own T cells to recognize and kill cancer cells by targeting mutated cancer proteins, called neoantigens, that are unique to a patients own tumor. Its a relatively new approach for cancer vaccines made possible by powerful and relatively inexpensive genomic sequencing of tumors that is intended to overcome all the previous failures in the field. Gritstones effort is also similar to one being used by Moderna and Merck that has reported encouraging results in melanoma and is now being investigated in a Phase 3 study.
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PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, CMC The Ministry of Health in Trinidad and Tobago has been ordered by a court to pay legal costs to a civil and human rights group that brought a lawsuit against it for information on the adverse reports of coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines.
The action was filed against the ministry by Umar Abdullah, the leader of First Wave Movement.
High Court Judge Justice Frank Seepersad said the information sought by Abdullah was important in the public's interest and should have been provided by the ministry.
He said that it was important for citizens to know the possible risks associated with the vaccines so that they can make informed decisions in deciding to subject themselves to the jab.
The Ministry of Health did not put in an appearance at the February 6 hearing although the State had been served with the court's previous orders when leave was granted for the claim.
The ministry was ordered to pay TT$17,500 in costs because only some of the information sought by Abdullah was provided after he filed his lawsuit.
On October 10, 2023, Abdullah said he embarked on a project to get information on COVID-19 vaccines and asked for the total number of adverse reports of the vaccines; a list of all the reports identifying specific concerns for example, blood clots, headaches, stroke and heart attack ; the number of people who died because of the vaccine; and copies of all reports sent to vaccine manufacturers, the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
He said during the COVID-19 pandemic Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh said the ministry's system to address the reporting of adverse events of COVID-19 vaccines was the online Events Supposedly Attributable to Vaccines and Immunisations (ESAVI).
On January 16, the ministry, in its response, said the total number of adverse reports made to ESAVI up to August 10, 2023, was 50.
It also provided a breakdown of the signs and symptoms.
There were also zero deaths as a result of the vaccine.
They included body pain, nerve pain, weakness, heavy, irregular, longer menstrual periods and later periods; pronounced pre-menstrual symptoms; heart palpitations; severe coughing; increased pulse and blood pressure; pain at the injection point; twitching of the face; muscle spasms and pain; joint pain; tingling of the hands and feet; fevers; shortness of breath; and headaches.
An epileptic patient reported increased seizures.
The ministry said it did not have the number of people who recovered from any adverse effect nor did it have reports sent to the manufacturers, PAHO, or the WHO.
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The French drug safety body has presented its work in mapping the extent of side effects after vaccination against Covid-19 in France, three years after the first vaccine was given.
The Rseau franais des centres de pharmacovigilance (RFCRPV) looked at 200,000 reports of post-vaccination side effects flagged by health professionals and members of the public over a span of three years, comprising over 157 million vaccinations.
This presented an unprecedented challenge to the drug safety body, largely due to the scale and timeframe of the vaccine rollout.
In theory there was nothing new about it, RFCRPV vice-president Dr Aurlie Grandvuillemin told Sciences et Avenir.
However, in terms of tracking a treatment that was administered in such a short space of time to such a large number of people, it was completely unprecedented.
The RFCRPV had to determine if the reports of side effects were related to the Covid vaccines while looking for any other effects that may not have been observed during the vaccines clinical trials.
Of the 200,000 side effects in the study, 25% (50,000) were classified as severe, said national medicines safety agency, l'Agence nationale de scurit du mdicament et des produits de sant (ANSM).
Blood clots - Rare risk
The RFCRPV issued an alert in spring 2021 about the small-but-possible risk of blood clotting events (thrombosis) following a Covid jab.
We were receiving a number of reports for patients with or without prior risk factors, vaccinated by Pfizer, Moderna or AstraZeneca," said Dr Grandvuillemin. So something was potentially going on.
Later investigations showed no statistical excess risk for vaccines using messenger RNA technology (Pfizer/BioNTech, and Moderna). However, a statistical risk (1 per 100,000 people) was found for the AstraZeneca vaccine, particularly in the under-55s.
At the time, the health authorities recorded 30 cases of thrombosis in France, after four million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine had been given. Nine people died from a thrombosis-related case.
Heart problems - Very low risk
Also in 2021, RFCRPV centres received increased reports of patients with inflammation of the heart (myocarditis) and the membrane around the heart (pericarditis).
They had been vaccinated with messengerRNA (mRNA) vaccines (Pfizer/BioNTech, and Moderna).
However, in July, the ANSM said that a link had been confirmed, but that it remained very rare, and did not call into question the benefit/risk ratio of the vaccine. This meant that the risks of vaccination were considered much lower than the benefits.
The Assurance Maladie came to a similar conclusion in 2022.
It said that vaccination with Comirnaty (Pfizer-BioNTech) and Spikevax (Moderna) increases the risk of myocarditis and pericarditis in the seven days following vaccination, especially in men aged under 30. However, the risk was low, given the high number of doses administered.
Menstrual disturbances - 20% risk after first dose
Reports of this side effect have been attracting medical interest since the end of 2021.
A recent study by the ANSM showed that there is a 20% risk of heavy menstrual bleeding between one and three months after the injection of a first dose of an mRNA Covid-19 vaccine.
The data shared shows that eight women were affected for every million patients vaccinated.
The European Medicines Agency added the side effect to the official list of risks for mRNA vaccines in October 2022, after the assessment of RFCRPV data. It was also added to the side effects leaflet enclosed within the vaccine packages.
Read more: Covid vaccine disturbs menstruation for some women, finds French study
"In some cases it is extremely complex and we have to work with almost impossible cases in which we cannot rule either way: a link cannot be established, but cannot be ruled out either, Dr Grandvuillemin told Sciences et Avenir.
Such cases include:
Pain in the extremities, insomnia, malaise, and lymph node problems: Infrequent (between 1 and 10 cases per 1,000 injections).
Skin rashes, swelling, or temporary facial paralysis: Rare (between 1 and 10 cases per 10,000 injections).
Severe allergic reactions (anaphylaxis): Very rare (less than one case per 100,000 injections).
Nonetheless, the RFCRPV sought to reiterate that vaccination had saved lives.
A World Health Organization (WHO) study from April 2023 estimated that between December 2020 and April 2023, the vaccine had directly prevented just over one million deaths in Europe, with 96% of these people aged over 60.
The latest vaccination campaign in France began in October 2023, and particularly focused on the most at-risk, vulnerable groups.
People can also get their flu vaccination at the same time as their Covid jab.
In its latest report, health authority Sant publique France said that most indicators of Covid-19 are dropping, or at a weak level, but indicators of flu are currently rising and are at epidemic levels.
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