Chair­man of the UWI COVID-19 Task Force Dr Clive Lan­dis is ad­vis­ing cit­i­zens to trust the sci­ence and on­ly lis­ten to ad­vice about vac­cines from reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies such as the World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO), the Eu­ro­pean Med­i­cines Agency (EMA) and Med­i­cines and Health­care prod­ucts Reg­u­la­to­ry Agency (MHRA).

“The vac­cines have all been ap­proved...we’re de­light­ed with the vac­cines, they are all work­ing ex­treme­ly well,” Dr Lan­dis said.

His com­ments, made on CNC3’s the Morn­ing Brew pro­gramme on Tues­day, came af­ter the use of the As­traZeneca vac­cine - cur­rent­ly be­ing ad­min­is­tered to cit­i­zens of this coun­try - was sus­pend­ed by over 12 coun­tries around the world, main­ly Eu­rope in the last month.

The sus­pen­sion was due to con­cerns about side ef­fects, es­pe­cial­ly peo­ple suf­fer­ing from blood clots af­ter re­port­ed­ly tak­ing the As­traZeneca vac­cine. But Dr Lan­dis blamed this on pol­i­tics and said the oc­cur­rence of blood clots in pa­tients was very rare.

“It’s very, very hard to study or mea­sure them. If you take the UK for ex­am­ple, they’ve had 18 mil­lion dos­es of the As­traZeneca vac­cine ad­min­is­tered, and they have been 30 cas­es of the sus­pect­ed blood clot and of them nine have been fa­tal, so you’re look­ing at a fa­tal­i­ty rate that is less than a mil­lion,” Dr Lan­dis said.

He said the im­pact of the vac­cine has been tremen­dous in Eng­land, ev­i­dence that cit­i­zens should stick to reg­u­la­to­ry pro­nounce­ments and not get dis­tract­ed by what he de­scribed as a po­lit­i­cal tug-of-war.

“Look at all the da­ta,” the chair­man said.

Just hours af­ter Dr Lan­dis’ in­ter­view, chair of the vac­cine eval­u­a­tion team at the EMA Mar­co Cav­a­leri said the as­so­ci­a­tion be­tween blood clots and As­traZeneca was clear but the cause for the re­ac­tion was un­clear.

In a state­ment, the EMA said that its re­view of the vac­cine was on­go­ing, and it is ex­pect­ed to an­nounce its find­ings on Wednes­day or Thurs­day.

And as the world awaits the re­sults of that in­ves­ti­ga­tion, Dr Lan­dis said he be­lieves the UK vari­ant will take over the world but the good news is that the vac­cines were work­ing.

He said this was the fourth time the glob­al pan­dem­ic was re­placed by a new vari­ant and the one that seems to be wor­ry­ing at this time was the P1 vari­ant from Brazil.

“We want to be mon­i­tor­ing that, so Brazil has had a heavy resur­gence and the P1 vari­ant seems to be suf­fi­cient­ly dif­fer­ent from the orig­i­nal vari­ant in that peo­ple can be re­in­fect­ed,” Dr Lan­dis said.

The chair­man al­so con­grat­u­lat­ed Trinidad and To­ba­go for re­ceiv­ing the first in­stal­ment of vac­cines from CO­V­AX. Dr Lan­dis added as the world deals with a vac­cine short­age, each coun­try must make the best use of the vac­cine.