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The largest EU countries joined a series of states halting their AstraZeneca jab launches on Monday over fear of blood clots as the World Health Organization and Europe’s drug watchdog insisted. in that its use was safe.
Both organizations will hold special meetings this week after several countries said they would stop using the vaccine pending further review.
The new suspensions were a major 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 decimated the global economy.
The three largest EU countries – Germany, Italy and France – halted launches on Monday and then joined Spain, Portugal and Slovenia.
The suspensions were not limited to Europe, Indonesia also announced a delay in launching the jab, which is cheaper than its competitors and was advertised as the vaccine of choice for poorer nations.
But the WHO insisted that countries should continue to use the vaccine, adding that it had scheduled a meeting of its experts on Tuesday to discuss the safety of the vaccine.
“We don’t want people to panic and, for now, we would recommend that countries continue to vaccinate with AstraZeneca,” said WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan.
“So far, we have not found an association between these events and the vaccine,” he said, referring to reports of blood clots from various countries.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA), which is holding a special meeting on Thursday, echoed WHO calls for calm, saying it was better to get vaccinated than not.
“The benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in preventing COVID-19, with its associated risk of hospitalization and death, outweigh the risks of side effects,” the agency said in a statement Monday.
The UK has distributed more than 11 million doses of the AstraZeneca jab, more than the entire EU, apparently without major problems.
– ‘Loss of money’ –
As policymakers struggled to manage vaccine launches, Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas announced that she had tested positive, underscoring the continuing threat of contagion.
She tweeted that she would continue to work virtually, and the government added that she had a “low fever but no other symptoms and generally feels fine.”
Italy provided another reminder that the pandemic was far from over, with most of the country re-entering the lockdown on Monday with schools, restaurants, shops and museums closed.
The streets of central Rome were quiet Monday morning and companies already battered by a year of anti-virus measures prepared for another hit.
“I stay open because I sell cigarettes, otherwise it wouldn’t be worth it,” said the owner of the Rome cafe, Carlo Lucia.
“It’s just a waste of money.”
Meanwhile, intensive care physicians in Germany issued an urgent call for new restrictions to prevent a third wave as the British variant takes hold there.
– Understanding the origins of COVID –
Today, more than 350 million vaccines have been administered worldwide, but the poorest countries still lag far behind.
Brazil, which has suffered one of the worst outbreaks in the world, is trying to restore balance, announcing on Monday the order of more than 138 million strokes.
The European Union has approved four jabs so far and is monitoring others, including Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine.
Russian developers said on Monday they had reached production deals in key European countries.
The news came when the WHO said it had raised nearly $ 250 million last year from individual donors and businesses to fight the pandemic.
WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the fund’s success demonstrated “what we can achieve together in times of need.”
More than a year after his organization declared the coronavirus threat a pandemic, a long-awaited report on the origins of COVID-19 is expected to be released this week.
The report follows a fact-finding mission of international experts assembled by the WHO, which traveled in January to the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus first appeared in December 2019.
“In the coming years, we will have really meaningful data on where it came from and how it came about,” said British zoologist Peter Daszak, one of the team members.
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