Denmark reports one death after receiving AstraZeneca vaccine
After receiving the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccination, Denmark said on Saturday that one person died and another fell seriously ill with blood clots and cerebral hemorrhage
The authority that runs public hospitals in Copenhagen told, they both were hospital staff members, who received the AstraZeneca vaccine less than 14 days before getting ill.
The Danish Medicines Agency confirmed it had received two “serious reports”, without giving further details. There were no details of when the hospital staff got ill.
On March 11, Denmark halted using the AstraZeneca vaccine just like nearly more than a dozen countries that temporarily paused the use of the vaccine. This happened after a small number of reports of cases rare brain blood clots sent scientists and governments scrambling to determine any link.
This week some countries including Germany and France changed their decision to suspend the usage of the AstraZeneca vaccine. European Union’s drug watchdog investigated reports of blood clots which said on Thursday that it is still convinced with the benefits of the vaccine outweighing the risks.
Denmark, Sweden, Norway said on Friday that they will take some more time to decide whether or not to use the vaccine.
“We prioritize reports of suspected serious side effects such as these and examine them thoroughly to assess whether there is a possible link to the vaccine,” Tanja Erichsen, acting director of Pharmacovigilance at the Danish Medicines Agency, said in a tweet on Saturday.
European Medicines Agency (EMA) director Emer Cooke said on Thursday the watchdog could not definitively find the connection between blood clot incidents and the vaccine in its investigation.
But she said the “clear” conclusion of the review was that the benefits in protecting people from the risk of death or hospitalization supersede the possible risks. The issue deserves further analysis, the EMA said.
In the EMA’s review which covered 20 million people in UK and European Economic Area, linking 30 European countries. It involved seven cases of blood clots in multiple blood vessels and in multiple blood vessels and 18 cases of a rare condition that is difficult to treat called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST).
AstraZeneca, which developed the shot with Oxford University, has said a review covering more than 17 million people who had received its shots in the EU and Britain had found no evidence of an increased risk of blood clots.
The company on Saturday declined to comment on the new cases in Denmark, but referred to a statement published on Thursday, in which its chief medical officer, Ann Taylor, said: “Vaccine safety is paramount and we welcome the regulators’ decisions which affirm the overwhelming benefit of our vaccine in stopping the pandemic. We trust that, after the regulators’ careful decisions, vaccinations can once again resume across Europe.”
