COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark became the first country to stop using AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine altogether on Wednesday due to a possible link with a rare but serious form of blood clot.
The decision will postpone Denmark’s planned shutdown of Denmark’s vaccination schedule to early August from July 25, health authorities said.
But that new timeline assumes it will start using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, whose rollout in Europe has been delayed due to similar clotting issues and whose use Denmark has suspended. That shot comprises about a third of the country’s total contracted supply.
Results from studies of the AstraZeneca-associated blood clots “showed real and serious side effects,” Soren Brostrom, head of the Danish health service, told a news conference.
“We have therefore chosen to continue the vaccination program for all target groups without this vaccine.”
Astrazeneca said it respected Denmark’s choice and would continue to provide data to inform future decisions.
“The implementation and roll-out of the vaccine program is a matter for each country to decide, based on local circumstances,” said the Anglo-Swedish company.
The European Union drug watchdog last week said it had found a possible link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), a brain blood clot.
It said the risk of dying from COVID-19 far outweighed the risk of death from rare side effects, but left it to individual states to make their own risk assessments and decide how to administer the vaccine.
Many countries in Europe and elsewhere have started using the shot again, and some have limited it to certain age groups, usually those over 50 or over 60.
Brostrom said joint studies based on Danish and Norwegian health data estimate that one in 40,000 people vaccinated with the AstraZeneca injection could expect this serious complication, with nothing conclusively related to age or gender.
He said Denmark has come a long way in vaccinating the elderly population most at risk of contracting a serious form of the virus.
Future target groups for vaccination had a lower risk of this. “This has to be weighed against the fact that we now have a known risk of serious adverse effects … with AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine, even though the risk is small in absolute numbers.”
So Denmark’s decision should only be seen in a Danish context, and “I understand very well why other countries will use it,” he said.
Denmark was the first country to initially discontinue use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in March due to safety concerns.
Nearly one million of the country’s 5.8 million residents have received their first injections, 77% will receive the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, 7.8% Moderna and 15.3% AstraZeneca.
Denmark is in the process of relaxing restrictions after the daily COVID-19 contamination rate dropped from several thousand to 500-600 in December.
Reporting by Nikolaj Skydsgaard and Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen; Edited by Hugh Lawson, Toby Chopra and John Stonestreet