The UK said Wednesday that it would offer alternatives to the AstraZeneca vaccine for adults under 30 as European regulators identified a “possible link” with rare blood clots, a setback for the world’s most widely used vaccine and a blow for the 100+ Described countries relying on it to save lives amid a global surge in coronavirus cases.
The European regulator, the European Medicines Agency, has no longer advised restricting the use of the vaccine in the 27 countries of the European Union, stating that it is up to national authorities to decide who should receive which vaccine.
Until the announcement, the UK had never let up in the use of the vaccine, making it a holdover in Europe, although many countries discovered unusual, sometimes fatal, blood clots in some recipients. However, there is evidence that very few Britons were also affected, forcing the country to reduce the use of a vaccine, which is the backbone of its world’s best immunization program, among younger people.
Concerns about the blood clots have threatened the pace of vaccination well beyond Europe. At least 111 countries of different incomes have administered doses of AstraZeneca’s shot, making it the most powerful weapon of international aid groups in the fight against the death toll in AstraZeneca Countries with a shortage of vaccines.
Both UK and European regulators said it was possible the clots were linked to the vaccine but that more research was needed. The European regulators described the cases as a serious but “very rare” side effect.
According to official information, the European regulatory authorities had received reports of 222 cases of the rare blood clotting problem in Great Britain and the European Economic Area with 30 countries (European Union plus Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein) by Sunday. They said that about 34 million people in those countries had received the AstraZeneca vaccine and that the coagulation problems occurred at a rate of about 1 in 100,000 recipients. The condition can be treated.
European regulators said they had carried out detailed reviews of 86 cases by March 22, of which 18 were fatal.
The agency reiterated that the general benefits of the vaccine still outweighed the risks, but urged health professionals and recipients of the shot to be careful about symptoms such as shortness of breath, chest pain, or leg swelling.
Many European countries have restricted the use of the vaccine in younger people as some scientists believe they are at greater risk of developing the rare blood clots. You also have a lower risk of developing severe Covid-19, which raises the safety bar for any vaccine given to younger people.
However, the regulator said it had not concluded that age or gender posed a specific risk and would investigate the issue further.
“This case clearly shows one of the challenges posed by large-scale vaccination campaigns,” said Emer Cooke, head of the agency, in a press conference Wednesday. “When millions of people receive these vaccines, very rare events that were not identified during clinical trials can occur.”
“The risk of mortality from Covid is much greater than the risk of mortality from the side effects,” added Ms. Cooke.
No other vaccine has sparked as much controversy as the shot by the British-Swedish company who used the Block Spats on supply cuts, its effectiveness and ultimately on rare but sometimes fatal blood clots that have been reported in some recipients.
These concerns prompted several European countries to first restrict the use of AstraZeneca in older age groups and then suspend it on reports of blood clots, only to reintroduce it last month after the European Medicines Agency issued a preliminary opinion on the vaccine’s benefits outweighing the risks .
Because doctors reported a higher incidence of severe blood clots in younger people, some countries decided to stop giving the shot to anyone under the age of 55.
Europe’s concerns about the vaccine’s side effects are also likely to threaten global vaccination efforts, with much of the developing world relying on the AstraZeneca vaccine to help fight the pandemic. The shot is the cornerstone of Covax, a program designed to make vaccine access more equitable around the world.
The vaccine appeared to trigger an immune response in which antibodies bind to platelets and activate them, German doctors and the European Medicines Agency have said. These platelets, in turn, caused dangerous clots to form in certain parts of the body, including veins that drain blood from the brain, leading in some cases to a rare type of stroke.
Doctors have said why the antibodies develop in these people is not known. Some component of the vaccine or an excessive immune response – or both – could be the cause, they said.
There is no known disease that makes patients more susceptible to this coagulation disorder after vaccination, according to the European regulatory authorities.
