The problems with the doses of the contaminated modern vaccine that was manufactured in Spain continue in Japan.
The news of last week was that Japanese health authorities had withdrawn 1.63 million doses that had been sent to vaccination centers across the country after the national distributor, Takeda Pharmaceutical, received reports from contaminants in some vials.
Now, the figure of suspended doses increases one million more and the death of two people who received injections of the affected lots are being investigated.
The event with the supplies of modern worries even more because Japan faces its fifth wave of Covid, the worst until now thanks to the impulse of the Delta variant and at the low vaccination rate, below 45%.
According to Taro Kono, Minister of Defense and the government in charge of coordinating the vaccination campaign, around 500,000 people received injections of contaminated sera, manufactured in Spain by the Rovi pharmaceutical, which last year signed an agreement with modern
Fill and pack hundreds of millions of doses from your coreavirus vaccine in your Madrid factory.
According to the latest information from Japanese media, a small black substance was found in a jar of the lot of modern in the prefecture of Gunma.
While, in the Okinawa region, the administration of modern in a mass vaccination center was stopped after detecting a total of five foreign substances related to Lot 3005293, a number different from the lot (3004667) in which they had initially detected the
Strange substances in 39 vials without using.
In Okinawa, they found “black spots” in syringes and in a jar, and in addition to pink material inside another syringe.
Although the Ministry of Health said after there were no problems with the safety and effectiveness of the vials with that lot number, and on Monday the vaccines were resumed in the center.
An investigation by Takeda showed that there is a high possibility that the black strange material is rubber that scraped when the syringes pierced the rubber plugs of the vials.
“The incidents may be because the needles were incorrectly inserted into the vials, breaking pieces of the rubber stopper,” said a ministry statement yesterday.
The Japan Times newspaper spoke with a pharmacist from the prefecture of Saitama who had also discovered black spots on modern vials while reviewing them before using them in mid-August.
“They were much smaller than sesame seeds, less than one millimeter. They looked sliced on something and floated inside the bottle when I waved it,” he said.
The concern rose over the weekend, when it was reported from the death of two men, 30 and 38, three days after receiving these doses.
“There is no evidence at this time that indicates that deaths are related to vaccines that contain foreign particles,” explained a government official.
From Moderna and its distributor in the country, Takeda, ensured in a joint statement that have not received particle reports in the lot used in the injections of the two people who had died, but who were investigating and that they would keep the informed public of the
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