A healthcare practitioner in Germany will administer the AstraZeneca vaccine on March 3, just days before the country stopped using the vaccine.
Photo:
Action Press / Zuma Press
BERLIN – Germany said it will temporarily stop administering Covid-19 vaccines made by AstraZeneca AZN -0.43%
PLC, the latest in a string of predominantly European countries to have interrupted vaccinations with the injection amid a small number of blood clotting cases reported on the continent.
The German government said it halted AstraZeneca’s shots on the advice of its drug agency. The country’s health minister confirmed that there were seven cases in Germany out of 1.6 million doses administered.
Denmark last week said it had interrupted AstraZeneca injections for two weeks following reports of blood clotting, and several other European countries quickly followed suit, saying they were doing so out of an abundance of caution. Norway, Ireland and the Netherlands are among the countries that have discontinued vaccination with the injection of AstraZeneca.
More about the AstraZeneca vaccine
Health regulators in the UK and Europe, along with AstraZeneca and its vaccine development partners at the University of Oxford, say there is no known link between severe coagulation and the injection. AstraZeneca has said that the rate of blood clotting among the approximately 17 million people in the European Union and the UK who have received the injection is lower than in the general population.
The European drug regulator said last week that it investigated about 30 reported cases of severe blood clotting, out of the roughly five million people who received the injection in the block. Last week, the regulator, the European Medicines Agency, said that “the benefits of the vaccine currently still outweigh its risks” and has continued to recommend its use. The agency said most side effects are mild or moderate. Clinical trials did not raise flags about blood clotting as a risk.
Write to Bojan Pancevski at [email protected] and Jenny Strasburg at [email protected]
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