Safety concerns behind Hong Kong abandoning AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccines, new book says
- In My Life in Medicine: A Hong Kong Journey, Professor Yuen Kwok-yung sheds light about his time as a government adviser during Covid
The Hong Kong government’s decision in 2021 to give up 7.5 million doses of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccines was triggered by safety concerns, a pandemic adviser has revealed in his newly published autobiography.
Professor Yuen Kwok-yung, the chair of infectious diseases at the University of Hong Kong’s department of microbiology, also disclosed details of how health authorities were not immediately ready for a lockdown at a public housing block even when experts deemed it necessary to contain the outbreak.
In the recently published English-language autobiography My Life in Medicine: A Hong Kong Journey, Yuen shared stories from his childhood to his time as a government adviser during the Covid-19 pandemic, revealing issues not widely publicised.
In 2020, British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca was among the first three firms that the Hong Kong government established a procurement agreement with for Covid-19 vaccines.
Alongside the 7.5 million doses of vaccines authorities had ordered from AstraZeneca, another 7.5 million jabs were procured from mainland Chinese firm Sinovac, and the same amount from Fosun Pharma, which distributed the German-made BioNTech doses.
Yuen revealed in his book that there was opposition from the government’s advisory experts on the use of jabs from AstraZeneca over adverse effects reported.
