AstraZeneca vaccine safe for Canadians over 65: Panel

Ottawa, March 17 : Canada’s National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) announced on Tuesday that the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine is both safe and effective for people over age 65.
The committee said real-world evidence has demonstrated that the vaccine is safe and effective in older people, particularly against severe illness from Covid-19 and hospitalisation.
The announcement is different from a recommendation made by the NACI itself on March 1, when its panel of vaccine experts said AstraZeneca hadn’t included enough people over the age of 65 in its clinical trials, the Xinhua news agency reported.
The committee said that three “real-world effectiveness studies” helped inform its decision to change the recommendations, including evidence from Britain, which has been administering the vaccine to people over 65 years and older since January.
The NACI initially recommended that people over the age 65 should be prioritised for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines instead of the AstraZeneca, because of “limited information on the efficacy of this vaccine in this age group.” On Monday, Germany, France, Italy and Spain joined a list of European countries to suspend use of the AstraZeneca vaccine following reports of blood clots in some recipients.