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Seven European countries – Denmark, Norway, Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Luxembourg – have suspended all or part of their AstraZeneca vaccine as a precautionary measure while investigating blood clot problems.
Danish health authorities on Thursday suspended all vaccinations for AstraZeneca for two weeks after a 60-year-old woman who was vaccinated formed a blood clot and died.
The move “follows reports of serious cases of blood clots among people vaccinated with AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine”, the Danish health authority said in a statement.
But it cautiously added that ‘at the moment it has not been established that there is a link between the vaccine and the blood clots’.
Norway soon followed and replaced all AstraZeneca vaccinations.
Austria earlier announced that the use of a group of AstraZeneca vaccines had been suspended after a 49-year-old nurse died days after an anti-Covid shot of ‘serious blood clotting problems’.
Four other European countries – Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Luxembourg – also suspended the use of vaccines from this group, which were sent to 17 European countries and consisted of a million shots.
Spain said on Thursday that it had so far not registered any cases of blood clots related to AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, and that the shooting would continue.
Spanish Health Minister Carolina Darias said she had been notified of cases of blood clots among recent vaccinations in Austria, but added that “so far no causal link has been established between the vaccine and the blood clot events”, and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) was evaluating the situation.
On Wednesday, EMA, Europe’s medical watchdog, said a preliminary investigation showed that the amount of AstraZeneca vaccines used in Austria was probably not to blame for the nurse’s death.
On March 9, 22 cases of blood clots were reported among more than three million people vaccinated in the European Economic Area, the EMA said.
Some health experts have said that there is little evidence that the AstraZeneca vaccine should not be administered, and that the number of cases of blood clots is similar to the number of such cases in the general population.
“This is a very cautious approach based on some isolated reports in Europe,” Stephen Evans, professor of pharmaco-epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, told REUTERS.
“The problem with spontaneous reports of suspected side effects on a vaccine is the big problem in distinguishing a causal effect of a coincidence,” he said, adding that Covid-19 disease is very strongly linked to blood clotting. .
AstraZeneca said on Thursday that the safety of the vaccine has been extensively studied in human trials, and peer-reviewed data have confirmed that the vaccine is generally well tolerated.
(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)