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.