OSLO (Reuters) – Three health professionals in Norway who recently received the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine are being treated at the hospital for bleeding, blood clots and low platelet counts, Norwegian health officials said on Saturday.
Norway suspended the launch of the AstraZeneca vaccine on Thursday, after similar action from Denmark. Iceland later followed suit.
“We don’t know if the cases are related to the vaccine,” said Sigurd Hortemo, a senior doctor at the Norwegian Medicines Agency, at a news conference held in conjunction with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.
All three individuals were less than 50 years old.
The European drug regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), will investigate the three incidents, Hortemo said.
“They have very unusual symptoms: bleeding, blood clots and low platelet counts,” Steinar Madsen, Medical Director at the Norwegian Medicines Agency, told NRK broadcaster.
“They are very sick … We take this very seriously,” he said, adding that authorities received notification of the cases on Saturday.
AstraZeneca said that an analysis of its safety data covering reported cases of more than 17 million doses of vaccine administered showed no evidence of an increased risk of pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis or thrombocytopenia – with low levels of platelets.
“In fact, the reported numbers of these types of events for the COVID-19 AstraZeneca vaccine are not higher than the number that would have occurred naturally in the unvaccinated population,” said a spokesman for the company.
These trends or patterns were also not seen during clinical trials of the vaccine, she added.
Before Denmark and Norway stopped launching the AstraZeneca vaccine, Austria stopped using a batch of vaccines while investigating a death from coagulation disorders and a disease from pulmonary embolism.
The EMA said on Thursday that the vaccine’s benefits outweigh its risks and that it could continue to be administered.
Europe is struggling to accelerate the launch of a vaccine after delays in the delivery of Pfizer and AstraZeneca, although new cases have increased in some countries.
Edition by Timothy Heritage