OSLO (Reuters) – Three health workers in Norway who recently received the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID-19 are being hospitalized for bleeding, blood clots and low platelet counts, Norwegian health authorities said Saturday.
Norway stopped the roll-out of that vaccine on Thursday, after a similar move by Denmark. Iceland followed later.
“We don’t know if the cases are related to the vaccine,” Sigurd Hortemo, a senior physician at the Norwegian Medicines Agency, told a news conference held with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.
All three persons were under 50 years of age.
European drug regulator EMA would investigate the three incidents, Hortemo added.
“They have very unusual symptoms: bleeding, blood clots and a low platelet count,” Steinar Madsen, medical director at the Norwegian Medicines Agency, told NRK broadcaster.
“They are quite sick … We are taking this very seriously,” he said, adding that authorities had received notification of the cases on Saturday.
AstraZeneca was not immediately available for comment.
Before moving Denmark and Norway, Austria stopped using a batch of AstraZeneca injections during the investigation of a death from coagulation disorders and a disease from a pulmonary embolism.
Still, EMA said on Thursday that the benefits of the vaccine outweighed its risks and that it could still be administered.
Europe is struggling to accelerate vaccine rollout following delivery delays by Pfizer and AstraZeneca, even as a spike in cases amid a more contagious virus variant has led to new lockdowns in countries like Italy and France.