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The Portuguese government announced on Thursday that it will resume the use of the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine next Monday, after a three-day break to check for possible adverse reactions from vaccinated people.
“The vaccination plan suffered a pause in the AstraZeneca vaccine and will start again from Monday. We will resume the plan, accelerating it and catching up, “said the coordinator of the pandemic immunization working group, Vice Admiral Henrique Gouveia e Melo, at a press conference.
The decision was made following the announcement by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) that it reclassified the AstraZeneca vaccine as “safe and effective”.
“The conclusions are very clear and confirm that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine are much greater than any identified risk,” Portuguese pharmacist Rui Ivo, representative of Infarmed (National Authority for Medicines and Health Products), told the press.
Currently, there are four EMA-approved COVID-19 vaccines: BioNTech / Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca, and Janssen (from the Johnson & Johnson group). Janssen will only be on the market in the second quarter of 2021.
Portugal registered 21 more deaths related to COVID-19 and 485 new cases of infection in the last 24 hours, totaling 16,743 fatalities and 816,055 infected since the start of the pandemic.
As the world struggles to contain the pandemic, vaccination is underway in an increasing number of countries with already licensed coronavirus vaccines.
Meanwhile, 264 candidate vaccines are still being developed worldwide, 82 of them in clinical trials, in countries such as Germany, China, Russia, Great Britain and the United States, according to information released by the World Health Organization on 16 of March.
