The move comes “after reports of serious blood clots among people vaccinated with AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine,” the Danish health authority said in a statement.
But he added cautiously that “it has not yet been determined that there is a link between the vaccine and blood clots”.
Austria announced on Monday that it had stopped using a batch of AstraZeneca vaccines after a 49-year-old nurse died of “serious blood clotting problems” days after receiving an anti-Covid injection.
Another four European countries – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Luxembourg – also suspended the use of vaccines from that batch, which was sent to 17 European countries and consisted of one million vaccines.
Denmark, however, has suspended the use of all of its AstraZeneca supplies.
‘Uninterrupted use, but paused use of the AstraZeneca vaccine’
“It is important to note that we have not stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine, we are just interrupting its use,” said the director of the Danish health authority, Soren Brostrom, in a statement.
Denmark said that one person died after receiving the vaccine. The EMA launched an investigation into this death.
“There is ample documentation proving that the vaccine is safe and efficient. But both we and the Danish Medicines Agency must act on the basis of information about possible serious side effects, both in Denmark and in other European countries,” said Brostrom.
The suspension, which will be reviewed after two weeks, is expected to slow Denmark’s vaccination campaign.
Copenhagen now hopes to have its entire adult population vaccinated in mid-August, rather than in early July, the health official said.
The United Kingdom says the AstraZeneca vaccine is ‘safe and effective’
Meanwhile, the UK government defended the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine on Thursday after Denmark suspended using the vaccine and insisted it would continue with its own launch.
“We have made it clear that it is safe and effective … and when people are asked to introduce themselves and take it, they should do so in confidence,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s official spokesman told reporters.
“And in fact you are starting to see the results of the vaccination program in terms of the (lower) number of cases that we see across the country, the number of deaths, the number of hospitalizations,” he said.
Britain began the world’s first mass vaccination campaign against coronavirus in December, supported in large part by the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab and another by Pfizer-BioNTech.
On Wednesday, Europe’s drug control agency EMA said a preliminary investigation showed that the batch of AstraZeneca vaccines used in Austria was probably not to blame for the nurse’s death.
As of March 9, 22 cases of blood clots have been reported among more than three million people vaccinated in the European Economic Area, said the EMA.