Spain will stop using the vaccine for two weeks, the country’s Minister of Health, Carolina Darias, announced at a news conference on television on Monday.
It is a “temporary and preventive suspension”, she said, “until the risks can be assessed by the European Medicines Agency”.
After initially defending the safety of the vaccine, German Health Minister Jens Spahn said on Monday that the country would suspend inoculations as a precaution, after reports of a handful of cases of blood clots in people vaccinated with the AstraZeneca injection in Denmark and Norway.
France and Italy also halted the vaccine’s launch on Monday, pending the review of the EU’s drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), although the body later reiterated its advice that countries fulfill the launch.
“We have decided to suspend the use of AstraZeneca as a precautionary measure and we hope to resume it quickly if the EMA board allows it,” French President Emmanuel Macron told a news conference on Monday.
The suspensions came hours after prosecutors in northern Italy ordered a batch of the vaccine to be seized, citing a man who fell ill and died after being injected. The Italian drug agency also suspended the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine “as a precaution and temporarily” before the EMA meeting, the Italian drug agency AIFA announced on Monday.
Much of Europe has stopped shooting for the time being, after the death of a woman in Denmark who has not yet been linked to a vaccine. Another death was also reported in Norway on Monday, along with a handful of non-fatal cases in both countries.
The suspensions go against the advice of the World Health Organization, EMA and the pharmaceutical giant itself, who said there was no evidence of a link to coagulation and that rollouts should continue while the reports are investigated.
“As of today, there is no evidence that the incidents are caused by the vaccine and it is important that vaccination campaigns continue so that we can save lives and contain serious illnesses from the virus,” the WHO said in a note to CNN. The organization added that it is evaluating the latest reports, but said that any change in its recommendations would be “unlikely”.
The EMA also reiterated that countries should continue their launches, adding that they will meet on Thursday to discuss concerns, but that the benefit of vaccination outweighs any potential risk.
“While its investigation is ongoing, EMA currently holds the view that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in preventing COVID-19, with its associated risk of hospitalization and death, outweigh the risks of side effects,” said the agency.
More than 11 million AstraZeneca vaccines have been delivered to the United Kingdom, which is now one of the few large European countries that still supports the vaccine. Spahn said he talked to his UK counterpart before stopping Germany’s launch.
AstraZeneca doubled the security of its shots on Sunday, saying that a careful review of the 17 million people inoculated with it in the EU and Britain again found that there was “no evidence” of a clot link.
He found that, of these millions of people, there were 15 events of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and 22 events of pulmonary embolism reported after vaccination; less than the number that would be expected to occur naturally within that population size.
However, the death of a woman in Denmark led several countries to pause their implementations until the evaluations were carried out. The Danish Medicines Agency said on Monday that the woman in question had an “unusual” combination of symptoms before she died.
Later on Monday, Norway’s Rikshospitalet hospital reported the death of another person inoculated with severe cases of blood clots, bleeding and low platelet counts.
In the Netherlands, a laboratory that monitors the use of pharmaceutical products said it had received reports of 10 cases of blood clots in people who received the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, but none had the low blood platelet condition seen in Norway and Denmark.
The UK has led the way in administering the AstraZeneca vaccine by far, with more than 11 million people receiving a dose, and has also maintained the vaccination. Real-world data from the country also showed that it is having a significant impact in reducing Covid-19 hospitalizations.
Wave of infections in Europe
The continent’s newest vaccine concerns come at a difficult time, with a third wave of infections threatening to hit Europe a year after the pandemic began.
Citizens were banned from traveling between regions as of Monday and were told that the entire country would be considered a “red zone” on Easter weekend.
The restrictions mean that, again, many Italians cannot celebrate Easter with their families. “I am aware that today’s measures will have consequences for the education of children, the economy and also for the psychological state of us all,” admitted Draghi last Friday, when the measures were approved by his office.
But the picture is equally bleak across Europe, where several countries are struggling to respond to an increase in infections.
On Monday, Germany saw another increase in cases. In France, hospitalizations are increasing again – and the situation became so serious in Paris over the weekend that leaders began evacuating around 100 patients from Covid-19 in the region, citing the increased pressure on hospitals.
Patients will be transferred to “other regions where the situation in the ICU is less tense,” said French government spokesman Gabriel Attal on Sunday. Parisian hospitals were already canceling many surgeries to deal with the outbreak, with Health Minister Olivier Véran saying that a patient with coronavirus was being admitted to their intensive care units every 12 minutes.
The main cause of the infection wave across the continent appears to be the most contagious coronavirus variant first identified in the UK; in France, the strand already accounts for 66% of cases, according to the latest official data.
This variant wreaked havoc in Britain during Christmas and the beginning of the new year, rapidly increasing the number of deaths in the United Kingdom, the largest in Europe, with more than 125,000 deaths.
A strict blockade and rapid vaccination campaign have since combined to drastically reduce UK cases and ease pressure on hospitals.
CNN’s Nicola Ruotolo, Niamh Kennedy, Paula Newton, Mick Krever and James Frater contributed to the report.