Health Cabinet Secretary Mutahi Kagwe has reiterated that Kenya won’t preorder Covid-19 vaccines that have not received global scientific approval.
The CS made the remarks on Monday during a Covid-19 press briefing after another US firm, Moderna Inc, announced that its experimental Covid-19 vaccine was 94.5 per cent effective.
The biotechnology company said the results are based on interim data from a late-stage clinical trial.
The trial involved 30,000 people in the US with half being given two doses of the vaccine, four weeks apart. The rest had dummy injections.
The firm based its analysis on the first 95 to develop Covid-19 symptoms. Only five of the Covid cases were in people given the vaccine, 90 were in those given the dummy treatment.
“The overall effectiveness has been remarkable… it’s a great day,” Tal Zaks, the Chief Medical Officer at Moderna, told BBC News.
Read: CS Kagwe Says His Remarks Casting Doubt On Covid-19 Vaccine Were Misinterpreted
Following the “impressive” results, the company expects to have enough safety data required for US authorization in the next week or so before filing for Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) in the coming weeks.
The Moderna vaccine is based on similar mRNA technology used by Pfizer and German firm BioNTech, which last week indicated that their vaccine is 90 effective at preventing the respiratory illness.
While lauding the innovations, CS Kagwe noted that Kenya will remain cautious and will only order the vaccines if they are declared fit by relevant regulators and the World Health Organization (WHO).
“Kenya will not be used as guinea pigs to test vaccines that are essentially not cleared. I think the history of vaccines elsewhere also proves us right and if also you look at vaccines that have already been launched then you will understand why we want the vaccine but also cautious. Those who are telling us about the vaccines are the ones who will rush to condemn us when we will start getting people dying or having serious side effects, ” he said.
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“As a ministry and in consultation with our experts in Kenya Medical Research Institute (Kemri) and elsewhere we are also studying all those inventions that are coming up.”
On his part, Health Ministry’s Director of Health Dr Patrick Amoth urged Kenyans to be patient as the vaccines undergo rigorous peer review.
CS Kagwe was last Wednesday forced to issue a statement after casting doubt on the efficacy of the Pfizer and BioNTech vaccine.
The minister, who is not a medical expert, had expressed his reservations indicating that he could not comprehend how one will be injected with a “disease” to keep the virus at bay.
In the statement, the CS pointed out that his remarks were taken out of context.
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Kagwe said that his remarks were in line with doubts that have been publicly cast by global experts on the efficacy of the vaccine.
“My attention has been drawn to a short video clip from an internal broad discussion about vaccines in which I appear to be skeptical about the efficacy of vaccines and how they work. This clip has been taken out of context as it was specifically directed at reports of Pfizer developing a vaccine that is reported to be 95% effective; this response is driven by the reaction of top medics and if well guided, perhaps we all should share in it,” the CS said.
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