VACCINE ROLLOUT IN EUROPE PUT INTO DEEPER DISARRAY
Safety concerns halt use of AstraZeneca as variants spread
As a third wave of the pandemic crashes over Europe, questions about the safety of one of the continent’s most commonly available vaccines led Germany, France, Italy and Spain to temporarily halt its use Monday.
The suspensions created further chaos in inoculation rollouts even as new coronavirus variants continue to spread.
The decisions followed reports that a handful of people who had received the vaccine, made by AstraZeneca, had developed fatal brain hemorrhages and blood clots.
The company has strongly defended its vaccine, saying that there is “no evidence” of increased risk of blood clots or hemorrhages among the more than 17 million people who have received the shot in the European Union and the United Kingdom.
“The safety of all is our first priority,” AstraZeneca said in a statement Monday. “We are working with national health authorities and European officials and look forward to their assessment later this week.”
The timing of the pause in inoculations by some of Europe’s largest countries — which followed a flurry of similar actions by Denmark, Norway and several others — could not have been worse.
Europe’s vaccine rollouts already lag far behind those in Britain and the United States, and there is dawning realization that much of the continent is suffering a third
wave of infections.
Leading immunologists fretted Monday that the decision by several of Europe’s leading nations to suspend the use of AstraZeneca would make vaccination efforts even harder by emboldening vaccine skeptics in countries where they are particularly entrenched.
The European Medicines Agency and the World Health Organization warned against an exodus from vaccines that would undermine rollout efforts at a pivotal moment.
“We do not want people to panic,” the WHO’s chief scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, said at a news conference, adding that no link had been found between the clotting disorders reported in some countries and COVID-19 shots. A WHO advisory committee plans to meet today to discuss the vaccine.
The European Medicines Agency, or EMA, said Monday that it would continue to investigate a possible connection between the AstraZeneca shots and blood clots or bleeding in the brain. But the agency said the numbers of such problems reported in vaccinated people did not seem higher than
those usually seen in the general population.
Germany, for instance, reported seven cases of a “rare cerebral vein thrombosis” out of 1.6 million people who received the vaccine there.
The European Union bet heavily on AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish company, last year.
In France, where AstraZeneca is being relied on to accelerate the country’s vaccination campaign, and where top officials had urged people to trust the vaccine days ago, President Emmanuel Macron called the suspension a “precaution” and expressed “hope of quickly picking them up again.”
In Italy, police on Monday began seizing 400,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccine on the orders of local prosecutors investigating the death of a teacher who had received the vaccine. The Italian Medicines Agency said in a statement that the suspension of the vaccine, among the most commonly distributed in the country, was “precautionary and temporary.”