LONDON – Several European countries have halted the launch of the world-leading Oxford-AstraZenaca Covid-19 vaccine this week due to reports that some patients have developed blood clots.
However, some experts and regulators say that these decisions are not only based on false evidence, but that they can also take the risk of increasing anxiety in one of the worlds that has the most vaccine hesitation.
“We have to be careful – but now it’s too careful,” said Mukesh Kapila, a former adviser to the director general of the World Health Organization, who holds senior positions at a number of other United Nations agencies.
“We have real information from tens of millions of vaccinated patients, and if it was a serious matter, it would have come to light,” Kapila, now an emeritus professor of global health and humanitarian affairs at Manchester University added the UK.
On Thursday, Denmark announced the suspension of the vaccine developed by the University of Oxford and the British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca. This came after reports of dozens of people having blood clots after receiving the shots, including at least one person who died in the Nordic country.
Norway, Bulgaria and Iceland followed suit, while other countries, including Estonia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Latvia, Italy and Austria, discontinued specific groups linked to the disease.
These countries stressed that no connection was confirmed and that the move was a temporary measure until they could gather more evidence. Denmark has said it uses the “precautionary principle” – the idea that it’s better to be safe than sorry until you have more evidence.
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However, some experts believe that this is a classic case of confusing cause with correlation: just because someone got sick after being vaccinated, does not mean that the vaccine caused it.
The European Medicines Agency, the main drug regulator on the continent, said that as of Thursday, 30 blood clots had been reported in five million vaccinated patients – about the same number as would be expected in the non-vaccinated population.
Britain, which has vaccinated more than 20 million people, most of them with the AstraZeneca shot, said the same. Both the European Medicines Agency and the WHO said they would investigate the matter, but stressed that as far as they were concerned, this vaccine was safe and effective.
AstraZeneca said in an email statement that its own data from more than 10 million patient records show that the incidence of blood clots is actually lower than the general population.
According to a survey by the British charity The Wellcome Trust, Europe is the continent that has the most vaccine hesitation. In particular, AstraZeneca has had a public engagement after several European regulators and leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron, suggested that there was not enough data to prove its effectiveness in people over 65.
Real-world evidence suggests this is not true, but damage to public confidence has already been done. At one point last month, there were millions of AstraZeneca vaccines that were unused in countries like Germany and France, in part because people were reluctant to take them, according to officials.
German Health Minister Jens Spahn said on Friday that he was “sorry” that he had suspended the shots in neighboring Denmark, despite what he described as a lack of evidence.
The United States has pledged about $ 1.2 billion for the development of the AstraZeneca vaccine and ordered 300 million doses. But it has yet to be approved in the US amid questions about the transparency of the first phase 3 trial data and a delay in the study being done in the US.
At the heart of this debate is the delicate balance that public health officials and governments need to strike: vigilance against possible side effects, transparency to maintain public confidence, but also not shaky allegations that unduly damage faith in this power. vaccines.
“This is a bit of a tricky issue because there is also the danger of enforcing these concerns,” said Hajo Zeeb, a professor at the Leibniz Institute for the Prevention of Germany and Epidemiology. “Are you saying that you remain on the side of caution, or are you saying, ‘No, we do not see anything extraordinary’, and are we continuing with vaccination as in Germany?”
One such debate arose in the UK in 2009 after a 14-year-old high school student died hours after being vaccinated against human papillomavirus, also known as HPV, which can cause cancer.
David Salisbury, then director of the vaccination of the British government, said they had decided to withdraw the vaccine, but they never stopped the vaccination campaign.
Importantly, he said his team did not comment to the media until the cause of death was known, which was a malignant tumor the next day and was not related to the shot.
“The story then fell off the news pretty quickly,” Salisbury told NBC News on Friday. Now he fears the strike of the AstraZeneca shot based on hazy evidence means that ‘the story will spread, and of course it will not help’ to overcome the hesitation of the vaccine.