At least three European Union countries are keeping AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine on hold for now, even after the block’s drug regulator said it was safe to use.
Denmark, Norway and Sweden said they would wait until next week to decide whether to resume rolling out the shot after several people who got it got blood clots.
They belonged to more than a dozen EU countries stopping AstraZeneca vaccinations, while the European Medicines Agency investigated cases of blood clots, some of which were fatal.
The agency concluded on Thursday that the British drug manufacturer’s vaccine does not increase the overall risk of blood clots, leading several countries – including Italy, France and Germany – to announce that they would be taking it off the shelf.
But the three Scandinavian countries were more careful, saying they wanted to finish their own national reviews.
Health officials in Denmark said they would not decide whether to continue the AstraZeneca rollout until after the two-week hiatus ended. The country announced the suspension last week after a 60-year-old vaccinated woman developed “highly unusual symptoms” before dying of a blood clot.
“It is important that we, together with the EMA and other drug regulatory authorities, take the time to thoroughly evaluate these types of reports,” said Tanja Erichsen, acting director of pharmacovigilance at the Danish Medicines Agency, in a statement Thursday.
Both Norway and Sweden said they would take into account the EMA’s conclusions as they consider restarting AstraZeneca vaccinations.
Officials pointed out the severity of some cases of blood clots. However, the EMA said they were rare – only 25 cases of blood clots were reported Tuesday out of the roughly 20 million Europeans who received the injection.
“Because of the situation with several serious cases in Norway, we want to take a close look at the situation before drawing a conclusion,” said Geir Bukholm, Director of the Infection Control Department at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.
The three countries differed from their Scandinavian neighbor Finland, which never stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine. Like the World Health Organization and AstraZeneca itself, health officials there noted that there was no evidence that the injection increased the risk of blood clots.
AstraZeneca’s US-listed shares were up about 0.6 percent in premarket trading Friday at $ 49.64 as of 7:40 a.m.