Coronavirus: Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine won’t be supplied to Hong Kong this year, source says, dashing experts’ hopes of replacement for AstraZeneca shots
- Hong Kong government pulled out of a key part of its agreement with AstraZeneca this week and asked the firm not to deliver the first batch of 7.5 million shots
- Top public health experts say the government needs to come up with more incentives to overcome residents’ ‘vaccine hesitancy’
While officials are pinning their hopes on second-generation jabs to counter new coronavirus variants, top public health experts such as Professor Gabriel Leung, dean of the University of Hong Kong’s faculty of medicine, believe the government also needs to come up with more incentives to overcome residents’ “vaccine hesitancy” and rescue a lacklustre inoculation drive.
Incentives could include loosened regulations for vaccine recipients to visit relatives in care homes and hospitals, he said.
“If the government believes in the efficacy of the vaccines, then there should be differences in the level of restrictions for individuals between those who have received the vaccine and those who have not,” Leung said. “This is based on science, not quid pro quo.”
The move followed findings by the European Medicines Agency of a “very rare” link between blood clots and the vaccine, which AstraZeneca co-developed with the University of Oxford. Local health experts had also expressed concerns that while the vaccine offered 70 per cent protection against the non-mutated coronavirus, it was only 10 per cent effective for a new South African variant.