The BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS (BC-CfE) Committee for Drug Evaluation and Therapy (CDET) has completed the evaluation of available data regarding the use of the four COVID-19 vaccines currently approved in Canada for persons living with HIV (PLWH). Those four vaccines are the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, which are mRNA vaccines, and the AstraZeneca and Janssen, which are viral vector vaccines. Based on the committee’s review, the BC-CfE supports the use of all four vaccines to protect PLWH aged 18 years or older against COVID-19 related disease if they have no contraindications to the product.
None of the 4 COVID-19 vaccines which are approved in Canada are considered to be “live virus vaccines”, and consequently they are not anticipated to be associated with increased risks of adverse effects such as vaccine-virus induced infection in immunocompromised people. The two viral vector vaccines, the AstraZeneca and Janssen, have been constructed with adenoviruses that have been modified so that they are unable to replicate.