- COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective, and no shorthand has been taken that could affect safety.
- But the U.S. State Department is finding that Russian websites are fueling misinformation about COVID-19-authorized vaccines.
- The websites involved have questioned the effectiveness of the vaccines and increased the risk of side effects.
Russian intelligence agencies are using online platforms to weaken confidence in COVID-19 vaccines being used in the United States, State Department officials said.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on March 7 this misinformation campaign.
A further report from the Alliance for the Strengthening of Democracy found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia along with other countries including Iran have tried their response to the uprising. appear better than the response of the United States and other western governments.
The U.S. State Department’s Global Liaison Center has identified three Russian websites – New Eastern Outlook, News Front, and Oriental Review – that disseminate this misinformation and are linked to Russian intelligence.
Much of the misinformation is aimed at weakening confidence in Western vaccines, such as those developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna-NIAID.
The websites involved have questioned the effectiveness of the vaccines, increased the risk of side effects, and say the vaccines were torn down through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) licensing process, the WSJ.
Some of the misinformation relied on actual news reports, but they put it forward without the broader context of data showing that the vaccines are safe and effective.
The campaign against the widely used Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine appears to be due to its potential competition against Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, a report by the Alliance for the Defense of Democracy.
This misinformation campaign comes as the spread of the vaccine continues across the United States. A recent poll, however, shows that public willingness to vaccinate is growing.
However, health officials are still fighting against the dissemination of misinformation of COVID-19 – some of it
Dr. H. Dirk Sostman, president of the Houston Methodist Academic Institute, said the FDA-approved COVID-19 vaccines far exceed the 50 percent efficacy bar set by the group last fall.
“A year ago we didn’t know if [COVID-19] vaccines would not work at all, how effective they would be, or how long it would take to produce them, ”he said. “We now have three FDA-authorized vaccines, with at least two more likely to be authorized this year.”
In clinical trials, two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna-NIAID vaccines had a typical anti-COVID-19 efficacy of more than 90 percent.
More recent studies suggest that the real-world efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine is also high – 94 percent in
The third vaccine approved for use in the United States, developed by Johnson & Johnson ‘s subsidiary Janssen Biotech, showed approximately 66 percent efficacy against moderate to severe COVID-19 in clinical trials.
Sostman warns against comparing efficacy results from different clinical trials, because the trials were conducted at different times, with different community-based coronavirus changes, and often with different interpretation of outcomes.
“In clinical trials, the J&J vaccine had a lower efficacy for prevention any symbolic disease, ”he said,“ but it is similar to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for prevention trom disease, keeping people out of hospital, and keeping people from dying. ”
One of the biggest concerns about the effectiveness of these vaccines, Sostman said, is how the variables will affect vaccine performance.
B.1.351, a variant first identified in South Africa, appears to reduce the efficacy of some vaccines. Tests show that other changes may not, however, have much effect on certain vaccines.
More studies are being done to understand how the vaccines react to the variables. In addition, vaccine manufacturers are working on augmentation scenarios that directly target these variables.
Vaccinating as many people as possible and as quickly as possible can also help slow the development of new variants of anxiety.
“As the number of people with disease – who can be ‘living Petri vessels’ for viral evolution – decreases – the level at which we see [new] viral changes, ”Sostman said. “Therefore, it is important that the population is vaccinated quickly.”
The most common side effects seen in clinical trials of COVID-19 vaccines are local reactions, such as pain or redness near the injection site, and systemic reactions such as headache, fatigue, muscle pain, and fever.
Although some of these are similar
The vaccines do not contain live coronavirus, so it is impossible to develop COVID-19 because of vaccination.
Instead, the vaccines train the immune system to recognize the coronavirus and respond to it if it occurs later.
The side effects of the vaccines are a sign that the vaccine has stimulated an immune response.
However, everyone ‘s views on the vaccine are different, so the lack of side effects after vaccination does not mean that the vaccine is not working.
Sostman said that the main important effects seen after the vaccines are made available to the public are rare cases of severe allergic reactions, or anaphylaxis, after receiving the vaccine.
This has only happened in a small number of cases –
“This is a little more common than with the flu vaccine,” said Sostman. However, “these reactions are manageable and there are no reports of deaths. ”
As a warning, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
People who have had other types of allergic reactions should be checked by vaccination site staff for at least 30 minutes after receiving the vaccine. Everyone else should be monitored for at least 15 minutes.
In the vaccine trials, there were a small number of cases
“These other reported effects have not been more frequent than the background number of the general population,” Sostman said, “so far there is no basis for concluding that they are the result of vaccination. ”
The CDC and FDA will continue to monitor the safety of COVID-19 vaccines after they have been released.
People who have been vaccinated can report possible side effects using federal government
Although much attention has been paid to the speed with which COVID-19 vaccines were developed, scientists have been studying pandemic coronaviruses and vaccines to protect against them for more than a decade.
“Sometimes people think these vaccines have come out of nowhere more than 4 months,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of the Baylor College of Medicine’s School of Tropical Medicine. MSNBC in December.
“This is not a 4 month process. This is a 17-year process. The detection and development of vaccines for coronavirus began 17 years ago after the emergence of SARS in 2003. It was the first major pandemic coronavirus, ”explained Hotez.
This is when scientists identified the spike coronavirus protein as a potential target for vaccines, Hotez said. All coronaviruses share similar spike proteins, which the virus uses to capture cells.
So when Chinese researchers publicly launched the genetic sequence in January 2020 for the novel coronavirus or SARS-CoV-2 that causes COVID-19, vaccine scientists were able to build on their knowledge. and vaccine technology.
Some of the “new” vaccine technologies used for COVID-19 vaccines are not new at all and have been in laboratory and clinical trials for years.
The AstraZeneca-Oxford, Johnson & Johnson, and other COVID-19 vaccines are based on the adenovirus vector vaccine platform. These use a modified cold virus to deliver coronavirus genes to the body, which trains the immune system to recognize and attack the coronavirus.
Vaccine developers began developing adenovirus vector vaccines in the early 2000s for diseases such as AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis, with several clinical trials since then using this platform.
Another newer technology is the RNA messenger platform (mRNA) used by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna-NIAID for their COVID-19 vaccines.
These deliver the genetic guide – in the form of mRNA – for coronavirus spike proteins to the cells, where it stimulates an immune response.
Scientists were able to work quickly to develop COVID-19 candidate vaccines. But clinical trials – which measured the safety and effectiveness of the vaccines – ran at the usual pace.
These were “as large and as careful as any made for other vaccines,” said Sostman.
One factor that prompted the development of COVID-19 vaccines was the large amount of government and other funding. This allowed vaccine scientists and manufacturers to focus on these vaccines, and encouraged companies to make early doses.
The “key time saver,” Sostman said, was that the drug companies were preparing to manufacture them before the vaccines were approved by the FDA. “That was because of the government’s promises to buy authorized vaccines,” he said.