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GENEVA – Countries should continue to use AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine, the World Health Organization said on Monday, after many governments halted launches due to fears of blood clots.
“We don’t want people to panic and for now we would recommend that countries continue to vaccinate with AstraZeneca,” WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan told a news conference.
His comments came as a growing list of countries, mainly European, discontinued use of the vaccine, pointing to cases of blood clots in people who had received the injection.
The WHO said its vaccine safety experts were analyzing the data and would meet on Tuesday, while Europe’s drug watchdog will hold a special meeting on Thursday.
“The WHO advisory committee on vaccine safety has been reviewing the available data, is in close contact with the European Medicines Agency and will meet tomorrow,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at the session. informative on Monday.
However, he stressed that country decisions to discontinue AstraZeneca prick vaccines, after blood clots were seen in people who had received doses from two batches of vaccines produced in Europe, were “precautionary.”
“This does not necessarily mean that these events are related to vaccination.”
“It is routine practice to investigate them and it shows that the surveillance system is working and that effective controls have been put in place,” he said.
No association
Swaminathan noted that no causal link had been established between clotting and the vaccine, which was developed jointly with the University of Oxford.
He noted that some incidents of blood clots were to be expected among the general population.
“So far we have not found an association between these events and the vaccine because the rates at which these events have occurred in the vaccinated group are, in fact, lower than would be expected in the general population at the same time,” he said. chief scientist.
Mariangela Simao, WHO Deputy Director General for Access to Medicines and Health Products, agreed.
He noted that millions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine had been administered in Europe, yet there had been no increase in blood clot events.
“So far it does not appear that there are more cases than would be expected for the period in the general population,” he said.
The new suspensions were a severe blow to a global immunization campaign that experts hope will help end a year-long pandemic that has already killed more than 2.6 million people and devastated the world economy.
While it was understandable to stop using the vaccine as a precautionary measure, WHO experts stressed that doing so as the number of cases increases in Europe would come at a price.
“The risk-benefit of … vaccinating with AstraZeneca vaccines and other vaccines outweighs the risk of Covid infection,” Simao said.
The problem is particularly worrisome as the AstraZeneca jab makes up nearly all of the doses distributed in the first wave of Covax’s global vaccine exchange scheme aimed at ensuring access to immunization for the poorest countries.
However, Simao emphasized that so far only batches made in Europe were being considered, “not vaccines that are provided through Covax facilities, which are made in Korea and India.”
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