Foreign fragments in coronavirus vaccines do not affect their safety, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said on Tuesday, commenting on the issue involving contaminated Moderna and Pfizer vaccines in Japan
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 31st August, 2021) Foreign fragments in coronavirus vaccines do not affect their safety, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said on Tuesday, commenting on the issue involving contaminated Moderna and Pfizer vaccines in Japan.
Kato's statement comes several days after one of the vaccination centers of the southern prefecture of Okinawa reported the discovery of foreign materials in several doses of the Pfizer coronavirus vaccine. In addition, some 1.63 million doses of Moderna vaccine produced in Spain were suspended in Japan last week after the country's Health Ministry detected extrinsic substances in some of the vials.
Moreover, two middle-aged men passed away after receiving contaminated Moderna vaccinations. The link between their deaths and the shots is being probed.
"In the manufacturing process of vaccines, rubber fragments sometimes may be mixed in, but at any rate, there is no issue to the safety of vaccines," Kato told a briefing when asked about other reports on foreign elements in Pfizer shots across Japan.
Over the past few days, media reports on identified foreign elements in coronavirus vaccines in different parts of Japan have been flowing in, particularly, from Okinawa, Gifu Prefecture, Tokyo, and neighboring prefectures, and others. Contaminated batches are generally those produced by Moderna.
On Thursday, Japan's Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., responsible for sales of vaccines and their distribution in the country, published the numbers of batches with contaminated vaccines 3004667, 3004734, and 3004956. Japanese media report that the vaccines from those lots were distributed to 863 vaccination centers across the country.
Takeda Pharmaceutical said that it has not yet received any information on safety issues linked to contaminated shots.
