KATHMANDU: In view of the increasing COVID-19 cases in neighboring India and China, the Ministry of Health and Population has urged all Nepali people to receive a booster shot of COVID-19 vaccines. The new variant, BF.7 has been detected in India and China, and its transmission to Nepal may take place due to open border […]
Do you need extra shots of the vaccine for COVID-19 if you are fully vaccinated?
Most people who are fully vaccinated against the coronavirus are relatively protected from severe illness and death from COVID-19. However, even highly effective vaccine’s immunity often fades over time. Early studies on vaccines that use mRNA to protect against coronavirus, such as those conducted by Pfizer and Moderna, have shown that they work regardless of the virus variant (such as alpha, beta, or delta). A new vaccine, called a booster, a few months after the first dose can help make the vaccine more effective, research suggests.
In case of Pfizer-BioNTech
Who has to get a booster?
Everyone (12 years and older)
When to get a booster?
At least five months after finishing your number one COVID-19 vaccination series
Which booster?
Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna (mRNA COVID-19 vaccines) are favored in most situations.Teens 12–17 years antique may also simplest get a Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine booster.
In case of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen*
Who needs to get a booster?
Adults 18 years and older
When to get a booster?
At least 2 months after receiving your J&J/Janssen COVID-19 vaccination
Which booster must you get?
Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna (mRNA COVID-19 vaccines) are desired in most* situations
What else does research say about COVID-19 boosters?
Boosters are only a kind of vaccine, and scientists already recognise that vaccines are presently the excellent protection in opposition to COVID-19, mainly its maximum critical effects. That’s why it’s critical to get vaccinated proper away in case you qualify, as maximum human beings five and older do.Research additionally has discovered that, in general, antibodies from vaccines decline over time.Higher antibody degrees from vaccines appear to make the common individual much less probably to get unwell from the coronavirus (vaccine efficacy).Booster pictures of mRNA coronavirus vaccines (Pfizer and Moderna) boom antibodies with the aid of using approximately 10 times.Boosters can offer you similarly safety in opposition to the Omicron variation. Early information indicates that this version is extra transmissible than different variants. (Source : https://www.cdc.gov)
Nepal started giving COVID-19 vaccine booster recently as coronavirus infections surged because of the unfold of the Omicron variant. The booster dose has been limited to frontline employees by the Health Ministry which will gradually be provided elderly in coming months. Nepal, a herbal buffer among China and India, has double-vaccinated 39.9% of its 30 million population in a marketing campaign that started early last year. The authorities have banned big public gatherings and urged one and all to strictly follow COVID-19 safety protocols. Authorities have additionally made it obligatory for the general public to provide evidence of complete vaccination to apply for public offerings.
KATHMANDU: An aircraft of the Sichuan Airways arriving from China carrying a shipment of Vero Cell vaccines failed to land at Tribhuvan International Airport (TIA) Monday morning due to adverse weather conditions.
The airplane returned to China with the medical supplies given to Nepal under the COVAX facility. The supplies incorporating 121,887 doses of vaccines are assisted by the Asian Development Bank (ADB).
Similarly, 1,870,500 doses of vaccines will be arriving from India on Monday itself.
So far Nepal has imported 35,466,980 doses of COVID-19 vaccines and 21,654,109 vaccines have been administered.
KATHMANDU, August 8: Additional 300 thousand doses of AstraZeneca vaccine provided by Japan to Nepal on grant arrived in Kathmandu today. According to the Secretary at the Ministry of Health and Population, Dr Roshan Pokhrel, on Saturday, Nepal had received 500 thousand doses of vaccines from Japan which has announced to gift 1.6 million doses of COVID-19 vaccine under the COVAX facility.
The remaining doses of vaccine will be arriving after a week. It may be noted that on Friday, Nepal had received 230 thousand doses of Covishield vaccine from Bhutan. The COVID-19 vaccines received from Japan will be administered to those citizens who have got the first dose of Covishield.
To date, around 10 million doses of vaccines (gifted and purchased) have arrived in the country. Nepal has bought four million doses of China-manufactured Vero Cell and two million doses of Covishield from India. But, one million doses of vaccine is yet to be supplied from India. Similarly, 1.1 million doses of Covishield have been obtained from India on grant and China has so far gifted 1.8 million doses of Vero Cell to Nepal.
Likewise, Nepal had received 348 thousand doses of Covishield under the GAVI facility and 1.53 million doses of Janssen & Janssen vaccines from the United States of America in gift. With the regular supplies of vaccines, the government had added COVID-19 vaccination centers. Now the number of such centers stands at 4,422 against 2,989 of the earlier. The Kathmandu Valley alone has 149 vaccinations centers against 83 of the past.
TAIPEI, TAIWAN, June 3: In the span of just five days last month, China gave out 100 million shots of its COVID-19 vaccines.
After a slow start, China is now doing what virtually no other country in the world can: harnessing the power and all-encompassing reach of its one-party system and a maturing domestic vaccine industry to administer shots at a staggering pace. The rollout is far from perfect, including uneven distribution, but Chinese public health leaders now say they’re hoping to inoculate 80% of the population of 1.4 billion by the end of the year.
As of Tuesday, China had given out more than 680 million doses — with nearly half of those in May alone. China's total is roughly a third of the 1.9 billion shots distributed globally, according to Our World in Data, an online research site.
The call to get vaccinated comes from every corner of society. Companies offer shots to their employees, schools urge their students and staffers, and local government workers check on their residents.
That pressure underscores both the system’s strength, which makes it possible to even consider vaccinating more than a billion people this year, but also the risks to civil liberties — a concern the world over but one that is particularly acute in China, where there are few protections.
“The Communist Party has people all the way down to every village, every neighborhood,” said Ray Yip, former country director for the Gates Foundation in China and a public health expert. “That’s the draconian part of the system, but it also gives very powerful mobilization.”
China is now averaging about 19 million shots per day, according to Our World in Data's rolling seven-day average. That would mean a dose for everyone in Italy about every three days. The United States, with about one-quarter of China's population, reached around 3.4 million shots per day in April when its drive was at full tilt.
It's still unclear how many people in China are fully vaccinated — which can mean anywhere from one to three doses of the vaccines in use — as the government does not publicly release that data.
Zhong Nanshan, the head of a group of experts attached to the National Health Commission and a prominent government doctor, said on Sunday that 40% of the population has received at least one dose, and the aim was to get that percentage fully vaccinated by the end of the month.
In Beijing, the capital, 87% of the population has received at least one dose. Getting a shot is as easy as walking into one of hundreds of vaccination points found all across the city. Vaccination buses are parked in high foot-traffic areas, including in the city center and at malls.
But Beijing’s abundance is not shared with the rest of the country, and local media reports and complaints on social media show the difficulty of getting an appointment elsewhere.
“I started lining up that day at 9 in the morning, until 6 p.m., only then did I get the shot. It was exhausting,” Zhou Hongxia, a resident of Lanzhou, in northwestern Gansu province, explained recently. “When I left, there were still people waiting.”
Zhou's husband hasn't been so lucky and has yet to get a shot. When they call the local hotlines, they are told simply to wait.Central government officials on Monday said they're working to ensure supply is more evenly distributed.
Before the campaign ramped up in recent weeks, many people were not in a rush to get vaccinated as China has kept the virus, which first flared in the country, at bay in the past year with strict border controls and mandatory quarantines. It has faced small clusters of infections from time to time, and is currently managing one in the southern city of Guangzhou.
Although there are distribution issues, it is unlikely that Chinese manufacturers will have problems with scale, according to analysts and those who have worked in the industry. Sinovac and Sinopharm, which make the majority of the vaccines being distributed in China, have both aggressively ramped up production, building brand new factories and repurposing existing ones for COVID-19. Sinovac’s vaccine and one of the two Sinpharm makes have received an emergency authorization for use from the World Health Organization, but the companies, particularly Sinopharm, have faced criticism for their lack of transparency in sharing their data.
"What place in the world can compare with China on construction? How long did it take our temporary hospitals to be built?” asked Li Mengyuan, who leads pharmaceutical research at Western Securities, a financial firm. China built field hospitals at the beginning of the pandemic in just days.
Sinovac has said it has doubled its production capacity to 2 billion doses a year, while Sinopharm has said it can make up to 3 billion doses a year. But Sinopharm has not disclosed recent numbers of how many doses it actually has made, and a spokesman for the company did not respond to a request for comment. Sinovac has produced 540 million doses this year as of late May, the company said on Friday.
Government support has been crucial for vaccine developers every step of the way — as it has in other countries — but, as with everything, the scope and scale in China is different.
Yang Xiaoming, chairman of Sinopharm’s China National Biotec Group, recounted to state media recently how the company initially needed to borrow lab space from a government research center while it was working on a vaccine.
"We sent our samples over, there was no need to discuss money, we just did it,” he said.
Chinese vaccine companies also largely do not rely on imported products in the manufacturing process. That's an enormous benefit at a time when many countries are scrambling for the same materials and means China can likely avoid what happened to the Serum Institute of India, whose production was hobbled because of dependence on imports from the U.S. for certain ingredients.
But as the availability of the vaccine increases so, too, can the pressure to take it.In Beijing, one researcher at a university said the school’s Communist Party cell calls him once a month to ask him if he has gotten vaccinated yet, and offers to help him make an appointment.
He has so far declined to get a shot because he would prefer the Pfizer vaccine, saying he trusts its data. He spoke on condition of anonymity because of concerns he could face repercussions at his job at a government university for publicly questioning the Chinese vaccines.
China has not yet approved Pfizer for use, and the researcher is not sure how long he can hold out — although the government has, for now, cautioned against making vaccines mandatory outright.
“They don’t have to say it is mandatory,” Yip, the public health expert, said. “They’re not going to announce that it’s required to have the vaccine, but they can put pressure on you.”
According to Dr. Samir Kumar Adhikari, assistant spokesperson at the Ministry of Health and Population, a procedure was underway to procure vaccines from four nations including China and India.
KATHMANDU, May 21: The entire South Asia is currently battling with raging second COVID-19 wave. India, the largest country in the region and the second most populous country in the world, is counting the daily infections six digits. Here in Nepal, the total infections have so far reached around 120,000 since the outbreak of second wave.
According to the Ministry of Health and Population, the country recorded 488,654 positive cases of coronavirus and 366,946 have been recovered till Thursday.
The number of people succumbing to the virus is 5,847.
Health experts believe that the second wave’s virus variant is highly contagious than the one in the first wave. The government has implemented a prohibitory order for more than three weeks to break the chain of the virus transmission.
So far, three types of COVID-19 variants are detected in the country and the latest (third) variant B.1.617.2 is said to be highly aggressive. Amidst this, the government had brought one million doses of the Covishield vaccine and 800 doses of Vero Cell from India and China respectively. The vaccines were provided by the neighbours on grants.
Though the government has further signed an agreement with India to procure two millions doses of Covishield manufactured by the Serum Institute of India, it could get only one million doses and the arrival of remaining quantity is unlikely for the time being when India itself is suffering the devastating effect of the pandemic.
The government has appealed to international support and cooperation for help in its fight against the virus. It has called on chiefs and representatives of diplomatic missions here to facilitate for getting the vaccines. On Thursday, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli urged the UK ambassador for help obtain the vaccine.
To date, only 2.13 million people have received the first shot of anti COVID-19 vaccines while 426,510 are totally vaccinated or got the booster dose.
The Serum Institute of India has said it is not able to supply vaccines to Nepal before the mid-January of next year. This is the Institute’s response to Bangladesh as well.
The government is preparing to bring vaccines from China and people have been asked to fill up the online form so that it could reach to the aspiring population easily after the arrival of the vaccines.
Infections and death rate are high in the country. Hospital beds are not easily available during emergency while hospitals are grappling with the short supply of oxygen gas and amidst this crisis, there lies a possibility for an alternative to curb the infection, claims Dr Samartha Singh.
He told RSS that nasal vaccine to control corona virus could be produced in the country if the government granted permit for the same.
Singh added, “Different vaccine manufacturers in the world have taken the study and research regarding nasal vaccine far ahead. Vaccine of some companies is in the process of trial. Nasal vaccine can be produced in the country within next six months if the government grants permit.”
Dr Singh opined that the countries like Nepal having low economic status could not purchase vaccine paying high price as fresh wave of corona virus is spreading and its new variants could still be seen for next few years. So it was necessary to manufacture nasal vaccine in low cost. The vaccine has the elements to destroy the virus at the occurring point as corona virus is transmitted from nose and mouth.
Drug Controller of India has given permission to Bharat Biotech to produce nasal vaccine. Similarly, Hong Kong University and Wantai Bio Pharmacy of Beijing have been working in the sector of nasal spray. These universities have been carrying out second-phase trial.
Likewise, Finland’s University of Helsinki and University of Finland have been doing pre-clinical trial. University of Virginia has also started pre-clinical trial. Israel and New Zealand have already granted permission to Sanotize, nasal spray, for domestic use.
Dr Samarth Singh said that nasal vaccine could be manufactured in the country and its patent right could be obtained.
Antigen of corona virus could be purchased and vaccine could be used through nasal spray, he shared. It has been found from research that this type of vaccine would work up to three to four weeks.
Also the Head of the Department of Neurology at Vayodha Hospital, Kathmandu, Dr Singh has already submitted his proposal at the National Health Research Council and the Ministry of Health and Population in this regard.
He said that they were hopeful the government would accept this proposal. “This is a big expectation and wish of Nepal like countries,” he added. According to him, the corona virus cannot enter the human body due to IGA Neutralized and this would be effective to children and elderly people as well.
Dr Singh shared that such vaccine production was practical to Nepal as it needs fixed temperature available in Nepal. He added that they could start vaccine production process if permission was granted to them for the purpose.
According to Indian media, the vaccine produced by Biotech Company of India is in a first phase trial and it is being used as trial for the people aged from 18 to 60 there.
It is being trialed in various hospitals in India. These hospitals are AIMS Patna, Apollo Hospital Chennai, St. Theresa Hospital Hyderabad.
The trial report would be received by November 30. According to experts, Nasal COVID Vaccines don’t require any kind of syringes. Dr Singh believes that such vaccines would be effective and affordable to the developing and under- developed countries.
Researchers Dr Munir of Lancaster University, Dr Samartha Singh and Dr Bill Peltry of Virginia University claim that such vaccines would be cheaper to other kinds of vaccines and effective to poorer countries. Dr Bill shared that though it was tough job of doing research of it, it was nearer to success.
Hong Kong University is also doing research in this area and it was being trialed on 7,000 patients. The Serum Institute of India is also carrying out trial of this kind of vaccine in India.
The Coronavirus enters the body especially through the nose, mouth and eyes. According to doctors, this virus remains in the mouth and throat for few days. The nasal vaccine kills the virus' colony in the nasal passage and in the mouth. So, the virus can't enter the lungs.
The Oxford University of UK is also involved in its research. The Government of China started the trial of this vaccine last November alone and has already mobilised 100 volunteers for this.
Most of the vaccines currently in use have employed the dead cells of the Coronavirus itself. This vaccine cannot be administered to people of every age group. Moreover, it has to be stored in a certain temperature.
But the nasal vaccine is free of these and similar demerits.
Even the World Health Organization (WHO) has granted permission for trial and eight various companies and universities around the world are conducting research on this. It is believed the results of these researches will be available soon.
In Dr Samartha Singh's opinion works can be immediately started in Nepal for development of the nasal vaccine by bringing this technology under trial in Europe provided that the country's regulatory agency gave the permission.
China's current COVID-19 vaccines can tackle new coronavirus variants spreading in India and can provide protection "to a certain extent", based on preliminary research results, a disease control expert said on Thursday.
