The Irish Vaccine Task Force recommends a temporary halt after reports of blood clots among those who have received the COVID vaccine.
The Irish Vaccine Task Force has recommended a temporary halt to the rollout of the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, following reports of blood clots in adults who have received the vaccine.
“The National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NIAC) has recommended that the administration of the COVID-19 AstraZeneca vaccine be temporarily postponed from this morning,” Ireland’s deputy chief medical officer Ronan Glynn said on Sunday in a report. communicated.
He said the recommendation was made “on the precautionary principle” after “a report from the Norwegian Medicines Agency on four new reports of serious blood clotting events in adults after vaccination”.
NIAC is due to meet on Sunday morning and issue a new statement on the matter.
Jonah Hull of Al Jazeera, London, said the Irish task force’s decision was cause for concern for the drug maker.
“The company was very quick to jump to this point and strongly defended its vaccine, noting that safety data compiled over the past two months showed no evidence of an increased risk of pulmonary embolism or thrombosis,” Hull said.
The recommendation comes at a time when Irish authorities have pressured the pharmaceutical company to speed up deliveries to the country.
Some 570,000 doses of the coronavirus vaccine have been administered in Ireland so far, according to government data last updated on Wednesday.
In total, 109,000 of these doses were manufactured by the Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, which developed its vaccine with the University of Oxford.
At the same time, Norway announced on Thursday that it was also ending use of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
“This is a cautionary decision,” Geir Bukholm, director of infection prevention and control at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (FHI), said at a press conference.
FHI did not specify the length of the suspension.
“We … are waiting for information to see if there is a link between the vaccination and this case of the blood clot,” Bukholm said.
Also on Thursday, Italy announced that it would suspend the use of a different AstraZeneca batch than the one used in Austria.
Austria has stopped using a batch of AstraZeneca injections while investigating death from bleeding disorders and disease from pulmonary embolism.
Denmark will not use AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine for two weeks after reporting that some recipients developed severe blood clots and in one case could have died, authorities across the country said on Thursday. They did not say how many reports of blood clots had been reported.
AstraZeneca, meanwhile, told Reuters news agency in a written statement that the safety of its vaccine has been extensively studied in human trials, and peer-reviewed data confirmed that the vaccine was generally well tolerated.
