Daily US Times: The EU’s medicines regulator says unusual blood clots are very rare side effect of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine.
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) concluded the benefits of the vaccine outweighed the risk after a study looking at 86 European cases.
The report reflected data on 25 million Europeans who received the vaccine.
The EMA could not list specific risk factors for the vaccine such as gender or age, but most blood clot cases were women under 60.
Separately, the UK’s vaccine advisory body said that under-30s there were to be offered an alternative shot to AstraZeneca’s vaccine due to the blood clots issue. Some 79 people had suffered rare blood clots in the UK after vaccination by the end of March – 19 of whom had died.
On Wednesday, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) advisory vaccine safety panel said that although a blood clot link was “plausible” it was “not confirmed” and the cases were “very rare” among 200 million people vaccinated with AstraZeneca’s vaccine for Covid-19 globally.
More than 132 million Covid-19 infections have been recorded all over the world so far, along with more than 2.8 million deaths, Johns Hopkins University research shows.
There were two main elements to EMA’s report – the link with blood clots and how this could affect vaccination programmes.
The European Medicines Agency had concluded there was a “possibility of very rare cases of blood clots combined with low levels of blood platelets occurring within two weeks of vaccination” with the AstraZeneca jab.
Most of the 86 cases studied in the European Economic Area (the EU, Norway, Iceland and Liechtenstein) up to 22 March were in women under 60 and 18 were fatal.
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