EU regulator to investigate Covid vaccines after blood clot deaths
The EU’s drugs regulator has launched an in investigation into whether any of the three vaccines approved in the bloc may be linked to a blood clotting deficiency, after several blood clot-related deaths were reported in various countries.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) announced today that several cases of immune thrombocytopenia — a lack of platelets in the blood that can lead to bleeding — had been reported under its vaccine safety monitoring process.
“It is not yet clear whether there is a causal association between vaccination and the reports of immune thrombocytopenia,” the EMA said.
The agency added that it would assess reports of the condition in patients who had received any of the the Pfizer/Biontech, Astrazeneca or Moderna vaccines.
It comes after a swathe of countries halted rollout of the Astrazeneca vaccine as a “cautionary decision” after reports of blood clots emerged earlier this week.
Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Thailand have since followed suit and suspended vaccinations using the Astrazeneca jab amid an investigation into a separate death of a patient in Denmark.
Meanwhile, Austria has temporarily halted specific batches of the Astrazeneca vaccine following a separate report of a blood clot-related death from a patient who had been injected with the drug.
The EMA said yesterday there was no evidence of a link between the events and the jabs, stressing that “the vaccine’s benefits currently still outweigh the risks”. It urged countries to continue with their vaccination campaigns.
Astrazeneca has insisted its Covid vaccine is safe and effective among all age groups, amid warnings that it is being made a scapegoat for vaccine shortages across the continent.
However, false claims about the vaccine’s efficacy has sparked a wave of scepticism over the safety fo the Astrazeneca jab across the continent.
Figures released by YouGov earlier this week suggested that four-in-ten Germans and French now see the Astrazeneca Covid vaccine as unsafe, after politicians in both countries made unfounded claims about the effectiveness of the UK-manufactured jab.
French President Emmanuel Macron earlier this year made erroneous claims that the Astrazeneca jab was “quasi-ineffective” among over-65s, after a report in the German Handelsblatt newspaper first made the claim citing German health ministry sources.
Questions over the jab’s efficacy come on the back of wide-scale vaccine shortages across Europe, as countries within the bloc continue to protest the EU’s sluggish vaccine programme.
Austria’s chancellor this morning accused the EU of not distributing vaccines according to population levels.
Sebastian Kurz claimed he had compared vaccine figures with colleagues from Belgium, Greece, Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic and concluded that they were not being portioned out equally.
Just over 8.6 per cent of Austrians have received their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, according to the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention’s Covid-19 Vaccine Tracker.
The figure is higher than Belgium, Poland, the Czech Republic and Greece’s vaccination figures, but lower than Poland’s, which stands at 8.8 per cent.
Kurz told a short-notice news conference that the EU’s vaccination taskforce had struck agreements with drug companies that went against its promise to deliver vaccines in line with countries’ populations.
The Austrian chancellor accused the EU of creating a “bazaar” for doses within the bloc, as he called for further transparency on how vaccines are being distributed among member states.
The EU currently has contracts for over 2bn doses of six different vaccines, although only 60.7m doses have been distributed across the bloc so far.
Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot vaccine yesterday joined the list of vaccines given the green light for emergency use by the EMA, which also includes the Astrazeneca, Pfizer and Moderna jabs.