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A Food and Drug Administration advisory panel gathered Thursday to consider issues including the safety of the shot from Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE, which employs a technology called messenger RNA that’s never before been used in human vaccines.
The government is prepared with a safety monitoring system that will go into place the first day of the immunization campaign, said Nancy Messonnier, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases.
“Vaccine safety and effective monitoring are a top priority for the U.S. government,” she told the panel in the online meeting. The CDC is considering working with the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to evaluate safety issues that may arise when the vaccine is in use in the general population, she said.