Senior official: Combination of two or more COVID-19 vaccines, not recommended

The coordinator of the national COVID-19 vaccination campaign, Valeriu Gheorghita, said on Wednesday that the combination of two or more vaccines is not recommended, referring to the fact that there is a reluctance of people who received the first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine to continue the immunization schedule with the same serum. Asked on public television broadcaster TVR1, if the people who received the first dose of AstraZeneca could get vaccinated with a different serum as a booster shot in case it is stopped from administration, Gheorghita answered: "There was no question to completely withdraw this type of vaccine. (...) If it is decided to impose an age limit from which the AstraZeneca vaccine is no longer administered and there are persons who have received the first dose and are below that age limit, a decision will be made on the vaccination schedule, if vaccination with the same serum is to be continued or we go ahead with another type of vaccine, following the example of Germany." According to him, distrust of AstraZeneca serum is "absolutely natural", but the benefits of vaccination and the risks of the disease must be weighed. He said that the vaccines we have available at the moment to combat COVID-19 "are not perfect", but that it is very important to have a monitoring system, so that we can prevent and intervene in time in case of warning signs. "We have these vaccines at hand. Undoubtedly they are not perfect, they are not vaccines that do not have these side effects that we see, and they are mentioned as a result of the product's characteristics. Today, the European Medicines Agency is completing the summary of the AstraZeneca product characteristics where to mention this risk of thrombotic events as an extremely rare event. However, what is important is to have a very good system for monitoring, reporting, recognizing these events, for patients to benefit from treatment, from a common approach from the therapeutic point of view, for there to be a common guide at European level to approach their cases and also the beneficiaries, the vaccinated people to know what the alarm signals are and to address a medical service," said Gheorghita.AGERPRES(RO - author: Dana Lepadatu, editor: Antonia Nita; EN - author: Simona Iacob, editor: Maria Voican)