Irish vaccination task force recommends temporary strike following reports of blood clots among those who received the COVID jab.
The Iraqi task force has recommended temporarily suspending the rollout of the AstraZeneca coronavirus jab, following reports of blood clots in adults who received the shot.
“The National Immunization Advisory Committee (NIAC) has recommended that the administration of COVID-19 vaccine AstraZeneca be temporarily suspended this morning,” Ronan Glynn, Ireland’s Deputy Chief Executive Officer, said in a statement on Sunday.
He said the recommendation was made “on the basis of the precautionary principle” following a report by the Norwegian Medicines Agency on four new reports of serious blood clotting events in adults after vaccination.
The NIAC will meet on Sunday morning to issue a further statement.
Jonah Hull, Al Jazeera, who reported from London, said the move by the Irish task force was worrying for the drugmaker.
“The company jumped on the bandwagon very quickly and strongly defended the vaccine, pointing out that safety data compiled over the past few months shows no evidence of any increased risk of pulmonary embolism or thrombosis,” Hull said.
The recommendation comes at a time when the Irish authorities are pushing the pharmaceutical firm to speed up its supplies to the country.
Some 570,000 doses of coronavirus vaccines have been administered in Ireland so far, according to government data last updated on Wednesday.
A total of 109,000 of the doses were manufactured by the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, which developed the vaccine with the University of Oxford.
Meanwhile, Norway announced on Thursday that it would also stop using the AstraZeneca vaccine.
“This is a warning decision,” Geir Bukholm, director of infection prevention and control at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (FHI), said at a news conference.
FHI did not say how long the suspension would last.
“We … are waiting for information to see if there is a link between the vaccination and this case with a blood clot,” Bukholm said.
Italy also said on Thursday that the use of an AstraZeneca bundle other than those used in Austria would be suspended.
Austria has stopped using a bunch of AstraZeneca shots while investigating deaths due to coagulation disorders and an illness due to pulmonary embolism.
Denmark will not use AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine for two weeks, after reports that some recipients had serious blood clots, and in one case may have died as a result, the country’s authorities said on Thursday. They did not say how many reports there were about blood clots.
AstraZeneca, meanwhile, said in a written statement to Reuters news agency that the safety of the vaccine had been extensively studied in human trials, and peer-reviewed data confirmed that the vaccine was generally well tolerated.