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After several other countries, including France, Germany and Spain, froze vaccination on Monday due to reports of blood clots in a small number of vaccinated people, the EEA said its safety committee “will continue to investigate the information” on Tuesday. .
The Amsterdam-based supervisory authority “called an emergency meeting on Thursday, March 18, to summarize the information gathered and any further action that may be necessary,” its report said.
French President Emmanuel Macron previously predicted that an EVA report on further evaluations of the AstraZeneca vaccine would be released on Tuesday.
The agency stressed that it still believes that the vaccine, developed by a British and Swedish company in collaboration with the University of Oxford, is safe to use.
“The EVA currently believes that the benefits of AstraZeneca in preventing COVID-19 and the associated risks of hospitalization and death outweigh the risks of side effects,” it said in a statement Monday.
Marco Cavaleri, head of the Agency’s vaccine strategy unit, previously told the European Parliament Health Committee: “We are looking at all the data, especially the deaths that have been reported.”
However, he added that the EVA “will see no problem in continuing the vaccination campaign with this vaccine.”
According to the EVA, suspected side effects included blood clots and sometimes “unusual features” were seen, such as low levels of platelets, the cells that cause blood to clot.
However, the agency emphasized that such a reaction occurred “only in a very small number of people who received the vaccine.”
“Every year many thousands of people in the European Union develop blood clots for a variety of reasons,” said the EVA. “The incidence of thromboembolism in vaccinated people is not higher than in the general population.”
The agency works closely with AstraZeneca, experts in circulation and other health services, as well as in Great Britain, “with around 11 million injections. doses of this vaccine.
The EEA discussed the issue last weekend and will “thoroughly analyze” possible side effects in the days leading up to the extraordinary meeting, the agency added.
