Infectious disease expert knocks Kamla: Covid19 vaccine 'saved millions of lives'

INFECTIOUS disease specialist Dr Peter Chin Hong says other than not being vaccinated, the biggest threat to people in this phase of covid19 is misinformation, particularly when it comes from leaders of any sort in the community.

“It is a global problem and the WHO (World Health Organization) listed it as one of the top ten threats to world health right now,” he said.

Chin Hong, a Trinidadian who is associate dean for regional campuses at the University of California, San Francisco made the statement after reading about Opposition Leader Kamla Persad-Bissessar saying hundreds of thousands of TT citizens were given fake vaccines, at a UNC cottage meeting in Chaguanas on September 9.

Persad-Bissessar said the government had mismanaged the pandemic to the extent that 5,000 people had died, calling it state-sanctioned murder. One week later, she advised people to sue employers if they suffered health issues after being “forced” to take covid19 vaccines.

In December 2021, the Prime Minister said all public servants and employees at state agencies would be required to take the covid19 vaccine by January 17, 2022 or be furloughed, barring medical exemptions. The deadline was extended to February 17, 2022 but the public-sector policy was later scrapped as covid19 deaths and cases began to decline.

Persad-Bissessar said, “Many phases of drug certification for covid vaccines were accelerated. A vaccine that may have taken years to come to market through intensive testing and screening was allowed to be pushed through by international regulatory bodies. Many vaccines injected into people’s bodies should have never been brought to market in their current formulation.”

Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh condemned the statement saying that it implied the hard-working doctors and nurses were complicit in a hoax.

He said, “For the record, the covid19 vaccines distributed in TT – Sinopharm, AstraZeneca, Pfizer, and Johnson and Johnson – were all approved by the World Health Organization prior to their use, and follow our stated policy to only use WHO-approved vaccines. Our healthcare professionals administered 1,554,804 doses, and it is critical to note that of the 4,444 covid19 deaths, 3,960 or 89.1 per cent were unvaccinated persons.”

The ministry’s last covid19 update on May 2, 2023 said 718,969 people were fully vaccinated with 174,836 being administered boosters. There were 4,390 deaths, 335 of whom were fully vaccinated.

On January 16, in response to a lawsuit filed by social activist Umar Abdullah of the First Wave Movement, the ministry said, according to reports made to
Events Supposedly Attributable to Vaccines and Immunisations (the ministry’s online system to address the reporting of adverse events of covid19 vaccines) up to August 10, 2023 there were no deaths as a result of the vaccine. But there were 50 adverse reports.

Symptoms from the vaccine included body and nerve pain, fevers, shortness of breath, headaches, weakness, a change in menstrual periods, pronounced pre-menstrual symptoms, heart palpitations, face twitching, tingling of the hands and feet, severe coughing, increased pulse and blood pressure, pain at the point of injection, muscle spasms and pain, joint pain and an epileptic patient reported increased seizures.

Chin Hong said the common side effects to vaccines were fatigue, muscle aches, fevers and chills, and the worse the side effects, the better the immune response.

He said blood clots were associated with the Johnson and Johnson and AstraZeneca vaccines. Those cases were rare, he said, but people with covid19 developing blood clots was a much more frequent occurrence. Both brands of covid19 vaccines were no longer in use in the US.

Although rare, he said, inflammation of the heart was more commonly seen in adolescent males after the second dose and the menstrual cycle could be modified slightly after taking the vaccine.

He said claims of strokes, fertility problems and the vaccine negatively affecting embryos were debunked.

He said any person could search on the internet and find something that supported their view. He said the source of the information was crucial.

Chin Hong repeated that the vaccine protected from serious disease, hospitalisation and death. It did not protect against being infected.

He also stressed that the mRNA technology used to make the vaccines had been in use since the early 1990s. It just became prominent as the technology was used for the covid19 vaccine rollout.

“Rigorous studies had been done. They were given emergency approval first by many countries because they were waiting to make sure it was okay since covid was new.

“But, at this point, more that 13 billion people around the world have received the vaccine, so it’s no longer new or inexperienced and there has been no increased signal of negative impacts of the vaccine apart from local side effects and a few rare medical issues.

“In fact, there have been multiple studies that showed the vaccines saved millions of lives. So unless it’s opposite day, the statement is not true, while my statement is backed by studies and science.”

He said the covid19 vaccine would have changed since the original. But, he said, many vaccines were updated annually because the diseases circulating changed.

He gave the example of the influenza vaccine which are usually updated every year.

He also used the analogy of a macaroni pie. He said the main ingredients were pasta, cheese and milk. Any differences in the pie made by an individual would just be different proportions of those main ingredients or the type of pasta.

“After the original approval of the vaccine for the components, the new vaccines don’t undergo as rigorous an evaluation because they are the same components.”

TT began its main vaccination drive in April 2021, although Barbados gifted TT 2,000 AstraZeneca vaccines donated by India in February 2021, which were used to vaccinate 1,000 front-line health care workers.

TT received its first bulk of 33,600 doses of covid19 vaccines through the covid19 vaccines global access (COVAX) facility in March of that year. COVAX came to a close on December 31, 2023.

The health and education ministries launched a vaccination drive in secondary schools for school personnel, parents and student, ages 12 and older in February 2022 and the Health Ministry relaunched its vaccination drive for the public on January 6, 2023.

Chin Hong said now that most people had either already contracted the virus and so had some immunity or they were vaccinated. The newest covid19 variant is the XEC. Still, Chin Hong said the immuno-compromised and the elderly needed to be careful and should get vaccinated at least once a year.

He said, in the US, while the number of people being hospitalised and dying was greatly reduced over time, those over 65 and the immuno-compromised were still being affected, especially in the summer and winter.

He said immunity decreased about four to six months after infection or vaccination, and there continued to be new variants. Also, people had moved on to their regular lives and were congregating more, and because of the increasing extremes in temperature, people preferred to remain indoors, so the virus was transmitted more.

He added that all the people he saw hospitalised for covid19 this summer were older and had not been vaccinated for covid over the past year.