The Irish Vaccine Task Force recommends temporary discontinuation following reports of blood clots among those who have received the COVID shot.
The Irish vaccine task force has recommended that the roll-out of the AstraZeneca coronavirus shot be temporarily suspended following reports of blood clots in adults receiving the shot.
“The National Immunization Advisory Committee (NIAC) has recommended that the administration of COVID-19 vaccine AstraZeneca be temporarily delayed from this morning,” Ronan Glynn, the deputy chief of medicine, said in a statement Sunday.
He said the recommendation was made “on the basis of the precautionary principle” following “a report by the Norwegian Medicines Agency of four new reports of serious blood clotting events in adults following vaccination”.
The NIAC will meet on Sunday morning and will make a further statement on this.
Al Jazeera’s Jonah Hull, reporting from London, said the Irish task force’s move was a concern for the drugmaker.
“The company has responded quickly and has vigorously defended its vaccine, noting that safety data collected in recent months showed no evidence of an increased risk of pulmonary embolism or thrombosis,” said Hull.
The recommendation comes at a time when Irish authorities are urging the pharmaceutical company to speed up deliveries to the country.
According to government data last updated on Wednesday, approximately 570,000 doses of coronavirus vaccines have been administered in Ireland to date.
A total of 109,000 of those doses have been manufactured by British-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, which co-developed its vaccine with Oxford University.
Meanwhile, Norway announced on Thursday that it will also stop using the AstraZeneca vaccine.
“This is a cautious decision,” Geir Bukholm, director of infection prevention and control at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (FHI), told a news conference.
FHI did not say how long the suspension would last.
“We … are waiting for information to see if there is a link between the vaccination and this case with a blood clot,” Bukholm said.
Also on Thursday, Italy said it would suspend the use of an AstraZeneca batch that was different from the one in Austria.
Austria has stopped using a batch of AstraZeneca injections during the investigation of a death from coagulation disorders and a disease from a pulmonary embolism.
Denmark will not use AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine for two weeks after reports that some recipients had developed serious blood clots and in one case may have died as a result, the country’s authorities said Thursday. They did not say how many reports of blood clots there had been.
AstraZeneca, meanwhile, told Reuters news agency in a written statement that the safety of its vaccine had been extensively studied in human trials, and peer-reviewed data had confirmed that the vaccine was generally well tolerated.