Hello and welcome to Science in 5.
I'm Vismita Gupta-Smith and these
are WHO's conversations in science.
We're going to continue
our conversation on vaccines
with Dr Katherine O'Brien.
Welcome, Kate.
Thank you, I'm really pleased
to be with you again today.
Kate, in countries where people
have a choice of more than one vaccine,
they're wondering
which vaccine to take.
How do experts like you advise them?
Well, Vismita, you know,
the world doesn't have
enough vaccine right now
to immunize everybody
who needs the vaccine.
So, we have a really simple
answer to this question,
which is when you're offered a vaccine,
you should take the vaccine
that you're offered.
We have a number of vaccines
that have been demonstrated
to be safe, efficacious and to be
manufactured with high quality.
And so, any of these vaccines
are ones that are going
to actually protect you.
If you live in a country where there's
more than one vaccine in the program,
you should consider yourself lucky
that you have access to the vaccine.
And when it's your turn
to actually get vaccine,
that's the time when you should get it
and accept what vaccine is offered to you.
If you're a person in a high risk category
and you've been one of the early people
to get vaccine,
that's something that you should do
as quickly as possible
so that you're protected.
And for people who are later
in the queue, like me,
who work in an office
and don't have any substantial
high risk exposures,
it's just our job to wait our turn.
We will get vaccinated
and we should accept the vaccine
that's offered
regardless of what vaccine that is.
So Kate, when anyone goes for vaccination,
they may be wondering about side effects.
How do experts understand
the risks of these vaccines
and how would you explain it,
these side effects that you're seeing?
How would you explain that to the public?
There's a method to look for
common side effects in the clinical trials
and then rare side effects
which are constantly surveyed for
in the routine use of vaccines.
One of the things that I think
people are concerned about
is a lot of information
in the media recently
about blood clots.
And this is a topic that
the WHO is looking at carefully,
regulators in Europe and around the world
are looking at very carefully.
We're in the midst
of collecting information
about these very rare events
that seem to be happening
in the sort of one per million,
10 per million kind of frequency.
I think it's important
for people to remember
that the reason that we're vaccinating
is because we are
in the midst of a pandemic
and we all have risk of COVID infection
and COVID disease that exceeds
the risk of these very rare events.
Nevertheless, what's important is
to assess from a numbers perspective,
from a risk perspective,
the benefit that vaccines confer,
and the very small risk
that these rare events
might be associated with vaccines.
So, both regulators and policymakers
are looking very carefully at these data,
understanding why they're occurring,
where they're occurring,
in whom they're occurring,
and trying to identify whether
there are specific groups of people
who are more at risk
for some of these events,
which it doesn't seem to be,
and balancing that very rare
and low risk against
the benefit of protection
against COVID disease.
People around the world are
working together
to make sure that information
from anywhere in the world
is actually collected together
and informs our understanding
of both risk and benefit.
There are regulators in every country
and there are policymakers
in every country.
And there is a system
where information is shared
up through these regulatory committees
and onto WHO,
where we also have an external
expert group that looks at
safety data that's coming in
from all parts of the world.
So, it is these reviews of the evidence
and as that evidence changes over time,
where these expert committees on safety
make assessments
of the benefit and the risk.
In addition to that, we also
have policymakers who are
equally looking at these data
and providing not only
within countries, but also
at the global level here at WHO,
through the Strategic Advisory
Group of Experts on immunization,
recommendations to countries
for that balance of benefit and risk
and how to minimize any risks
that might otherwise be present.
Thank you, Kate.
That was Science in 5 today.
Until next time then.
Stay safe, stay healthy
and stick with science.