Santa Clara County to Stop Administering Moderna Vaccine Bundle



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After struggling for weeks to expand the COVID-19 vaccine deployment in South Bay, Santa Clara County officials are now warning that a specific batch of doses should not be given due to increased risk of allergic reactions .

Santa Clara County received approximately 21,800 doses of the Moderna 41L20A batch distributed on January 5 and 12. Over 330,000 doses of the batch have been distributed statewide. Now health officials are suspending the vaccines from the batch and warning that some people could experience an acute allergic reaction, anaphylaxis, after being injected.

“To the knowledge of the county, no dose of this batch of vaccine has been administered to anyone in Santa Clara County,” the county health department said in a statement.

State health officials announced on Sunday that fewer than 10 people who received the vaccine from this batch had a reaction that required medical attention, and that the decision to withhold administration of the batch was “out of extreme caution.” . The reactions were recorded in several individuals at a large vaccination site in San Diego.

“Our goal is to deliver the COVID vaccine safely, quickly and fairly,” said Dr. Erica S. Pan, California State Epidemiologist.

Pan said the California Department of Public Health “is recommending that suppliers use other available vaccine stocks and suspend administration of Moderna Lot 041L20A vaccines until investigated by the CDC , FDA, Moderna and the State be completed.

County officials have notified health care providers who received doses of this batch, specifically Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, Stanford Health Care, and El Camino Health. Health officials said they were not aware of any unusual adverse reactions to COVID-19 vaccinations in Santa Clara County, but have suspended administration of this batch to comply with the recommendation of State.

“We did not administer any vaccine from this batch and removed it from our current inventory,” said El Camino Health spokesperson Christopher Brown. “We are awaiting further information from Santa Clara County and the California Department of Public Health. El Camino Health’s community vaccination clinic will run as planned tomorrow using the Moderna vaccine which is not from this specific batch.

Dr Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said the fact that allergic reactions were detected early and the spell drawn was an example of how well the system worked.

“It’s a known complication of the vaccine,” Benjamin said. “The number (of reactions) is still very low, but the fact that they come from a batch, a place, a company means that the investigation (into the cause) should be much easier.”

Meanwhile, Benjamin said, millions of doses of VOCsThe ID-19 vaccines have already been administered without complications.

Kaiser Permanente officials told the San José Spotlight in a statement that all vaccines in the batch in question had been removed from the system’s vaccine supply.

“At Kaiser Permanente, we have not recorded any serious adverse effects in patients who received the vaccine from this batch,” the statement said. “Although the vaccine supply is extremely limited, this situation affects only a relatively small percentage of our supply.”

Stanford Health Care spokeswoman Julie Greicius said Stanford had received 4,000 doses of the batch in question, but none had yet been used.

“The doses are being sequestered until our county and state health authorities receive further instructions,” Greicius said.

State and county officials promised updates as they learned more.

County officials also announced over the weekend that a new variant of COVID-19 had been discovered in Santa Clara County. Scientists are not sure how infectious or transmissible the variant is, but it has become more prevalent since November and has been linked to several large outbreaks in the South Bay.

As of January 18, the county had reported 93,557 cases of COVID-19 and 1,076 deaths.

For common reader questions about the vaccine rollout in Santa Clara County, click here

Contact Madelyn Reese at [email protected] or follow her on Twitter @MadelynGReese



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