John Dwyer
Immunologist and emeritus professor of medicineDear fellow Australians aged over 60, as is so obvious with the latest COVID-19 outbreak locking down all of greater Sydney and beyond for two weeks, our failure to vaccinate our population has left us vulnerable to ever more dangerous variations of the SARS virus.
COVID-19 is a horrible disease and abundant worldwide experience has demonstrated that we “oldies” over 60 (there are more than four million of us in Australia) are most vulnerable to serious infection and even death if infected. Bottom line: you don’t want to get COVID.
Many of us are caught on the horns of a dilemma. Yes, we want to be vaccinated. But isn’t the AstraZeneca vaccine currently available to people aged 60 and over just too dangerous to be acceptable?
Lockdown ... Manly Beach on weekend. Credit:Jacky Ghossein
In a nutshell, no. The publicity associated with the very rare complications experienced with this vaccine has had a disastrous effect on public confidence. I can reassure you that AstraZeneca remains a highly effective vaccine, and the benefits for us far outweigh any risks. I can state with confidence that if you were fully vaccinated (two injections) with AstraZeneca, you would have next to nothing to fear from the current crisis in Sydney –but much more to fear if you chose to wait instead for the alternative vaccine.
We have an abundance of the AZ vaccine, which we make locally, currently producing about 800,000 doses a week. The excellent Pfizer vaccine is in short supply and this will be the case for a number of months yet.
You need to be vaccinated – yesterday.
And yet doctors are reporting that leftover supplies of the AstraZeneca are at risk of going to waste, expiring in their overstocked fridges because of falling demand. That is happening because of a misguided decline in confidence in AstraZeneca since authorities lifted the age for AZ to people aged 60 and over rather than the old 50 threshold. They also announced plans to phase out AstraZeneca by October.
But we can’t afford to wait that long. Less than 4 per cent of Australians are fully vaccinated.
And AZ can still do the job. Three weeks after even one dose, protection gained against most variants of the virus is sufficient to prevent you having a serious infection that would require hospitalisation. A second dose will provide you with protection from serious consequences from infection with the delta strain. Protection from delta with the Pfizer vaccine also requires two doses.
But what about those scary side effects? About one person among 250,000 people vaccinated with the AZ vaccine will develop a problem wherein they develop blood clots in blood vessels. Most people with this complication recover spontaneously. About one in a million has died from the complication.
The good news is that we now understand the cause of the problem and have very effective treatments for the condition. That, unfortunately, has received little publicity. And, by the way, the risk of thrombosis associated with an actual COVID infection is about 39 per million.
In an outbreak like the one we are currently experiencing in Sydney, you are far more likely to die from a COVID infection than from an AstraZenenca vaccination.
While we could debate the decision of the government’s advisory committee to recommend AZ vaccination for only people aged 60 and over, we would be foolish to sit back and wait for Pfizer to be available to us. The anticipated supply of adequate volumes of the Pfizer vaccine is far from certain.
I will have my second AstraZeneca shot next week and I am looking forward to the protection it will give me from potentially deadly coronaviruses in circulation.
If you are one of the many who were set to be vaccinated with AstraZeneca but cancelled for fear of side effects, reconsider urgently. Protect yourselves now. You will be helping to develop an Australia that is COVID-proof.
We are living with a pandemic where the enemy is winning despite the availability of an effective neutraliser. Let the facts, not the scaremongering, determine your decision-making.
Professor John Dwyer is an immunologist and an emeritus professor of medicine at UNSW.
Professor John Dwyer is an immunologist and an emeritus professor of medicine at UNSW.
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2021-06-27 05:19:24Z
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