A health practitioner in Germany administered the AstraZeneca vaccine on March 3, a few days before the country stopped using the vaccine.
Photo:
Action Press / Zuma Press
BERLIN – Germany says temporary administration of Covid-19 vaccines by AstraZeneca AZN suspended -0.43%
PLC, the latest in a series of mostly European countries to have interrupted vaccinations with the shot amid a small number of blood clots reported on the continent.
The German government said AstraZeneca shots were stopped on the advice of its drug agency. The country’s health minister confirmed that there were seven cases in Germany of the 1.6 million doses administered.
Denmark said last week that it had suspended AstraZeneca shots for two weeks after reports of blood clots, and several other European countries quickly followed suit, saying they were doing so out of an abundance of caution. Norway, Ireland and the Netherlands are among countries that have interrupted the vaccination with AstraZeneca’s shot.
More about the AstraZeneca vaccine
Health regulators in the UK and Europe, along with AstraZeneca and its vaccine development partners at the University of Oxford, say there is no link between severe clotting and the shot. AstraZeneca said the number of cases of blood clots among the approximately 17 million people in the European Union and the United Kingdom who were shot was lower than for the general population.
The medicine regulator in Europe said last week it was investigating about thirty cases of severe clotting, out of about five million people who got the shot in the block. Last week, the regulator, the European Medicines Agency, said that the benefits of the vaccine currently outweigh the risks and still recommended its use. The agency said most side effects are mild or moderate. Clinical trials have not raised flags about blood clotting as a risk.
Write to Bojan Pancevski at [email protected] and Jenny Strasburg at [email protected]
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