Of the 30 cases recorded up to and including March 24, “Seven unfortunately died”, announced on Saturday April 3 the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), the UK’s drug safety agency, in a press release.
The regulator said it had received, on that date, reports of 22 cases of cerebral venous thrombosis and eight other cases of thrombosis associated with a lack of platelets, out of a total of 18.1 million doses administered. “Our in-depth examination of these reports is continuing”MHRA director June Raine said in the statement, adding that no similar cases have been reported for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
“The benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in preventing Covid-19 infection and its complications continue to far outweigh the risks and the public should continue to receive the vaccine when prompted to do so”, she added. By publishing an opinion on Thursday on the side effects of vaccines administered in the country, the MHRA had already ruled that “The risk of having this type of blood clots is very low”. More generally, “The number and nature of the side effects reported so far is not unusual compared to other types of vaccines in common use”, according to her.
A “rare” risk less and less contested
AstraZeneca’s vaccine, developed with the University of Oxford, is under suspicion in several countries after severe cases of blood clots, and some states have decided to no longer administer this vaccine below one. certain age. “No causal link is proven, wished to recall the European Medicines Agency (EMA) on March 31, but it is possible and further analyzes are underway. “
But other specialists across Europe are more adamant. “We must stop speculating whether there is a link or not. All of these cases had these symptoms three to ten days after the AstraZeneca inoculation. We did not find any other trigger factor ”, explained on March 27 to the Norwegian channel TV2 Pal André Holme, head of a team at the National Hospital in Oslo working on these cases. “The Norwegian Medicines Agency believes there is a probable link with the vaccine”, for his part, told AFP Steinar Madsen, one of his officials.
In France, the National Medicines Safety Agency confirmed on March 26 the existence of a “rare” risk, based on “The very atypical nature of these thromboses, their similar clinical pictures and the homogeneous time to onset”.
The EAJ will meet again to discuss this issue from April 6 to 9. According to the figures that the agency unveiled on Wednesday, there are at this stage 62 cases of cerebral venous thrombosis in the world, including 44 in the 30 countries of the European Economic Area (EU, Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein) for 9, 2 million doses of vaccine administered. Fourteen deaths were recorded, without always being able to be attributable in a sure way to these atypical thromboses, specified the boss of the AEM, Emer Cooke, Wednesday during a videoconference.
The Netherlands announced on Friday to temporarily suspend injections of this product for those under 60, following a similar decision taken Tuesday in Germany. They followed suit in Canada and France (55), Sweden and Finland (65).
The most bereaved country in Europe with nearly 127,000 dead, the United Kingdom has deployed one of the most advanced coronavirus vaccination campaigns in the world, with more than 31.3 million first doses and nearly 5 million second doses already administered since early December.
