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Several European countries have suspended all or part of the launch of the AstraZeneca vaccine as a precaution while investigating issues related to blood clots, but French and EU regulators say there is “no need” to stop vaccinations.
Danish health officials suspended all AstraZeneca vaccinations on Thursday for two weeks after a 60-year-old woman who had been vaccinated formed a blood clot and died.
The measure “follows reports of serious cases of 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”.
Norway soon followed suit, suspending all AstraZeneca vaccinations.
Austria previously announced 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.
Four other European countries – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Luxembourg – they also suspended the use of vaccines from that batch, which was shipped to 17 European countries and consisted of one million vaccines.
‘No causal link’
Other countries, including France, said they would continue to administer the vaccine, citing the EU drug regulator’s decision that the AstraZeneca jab was still safe for use.
French Health Minister Olivier Véran said on Thursday that he consulted the French medicines agency, which said there was “no need” to suspend vaccines.
Its Spanish counterpart, Carolina Darias, said that “so far, no causal link between the vaccine and blood clot events has been established”.
On Wednesday, EMA, Europe’s drug enforcement agency, 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.
Some health experts said there was little evidence to suggest that the AstraZeneca vaccine should not be administered and that cases of blood clots corresponded to the rate of such cases in the general population.
“This is a super-careful approach based on some isolated reports in Europe,” Stephen Evans, professor of pharmacoepidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told REUTERS.
“The problem with spontaneous reports of suspected adverse reactions to a vaccine is the enormous difficulty in distinguishing a causal effect from a coincidence,” he said, adding that Covid-19 disease was strongly associated with blood clotting.
AstraZeneca said on Thursday that the safety of its vaccine was extensively studied in tests on humans and peer-reviewed data confirmed that the vaccine was generally well tolerated.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)