COPENHAGEN (Reuters) – Denmark said on Saturday that one person had died and another had fallen seriously ill with blood clots and cerebral haemorrhage after receiving the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.
The two, both hospital staff members, had received the AstraZeneca vaccine less than 14 days before they became ill, the authority that manages Copenhagen’s public hospitals said.
The Danish Medicines Agency confirmed that it had received two “serious reports”, without giving further details. There were no details of when the hospital staff fell ill.
Denmark, which stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine on March 11, was among more than a dozen countries that temporarily stopped using the vaccine after a small number of reports of rare clot cases of brain blood send scientists and governments in search of any link.
Some countries such as Germany and France reversed their decision this week to suspend vaccine use following an investigation into reports of blood clots by the European Union’s drug vigilante, who said on Thursday that he still is convinced that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks.
Denmark, along with Sweden and Norway, said Friday they needed more time to decide whether to use the vaccine.
“We prioritize reports of possible serious side effects like 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 Agency for Pharmacovigilance, said in a tweet on Saturday. Medicine.
“We are in the process of dealing with the two specific cases.”
The director of the European Medicines Agency (EMA), Emer Cooke, said on Thursday that the watchdog could not definitively rule out a link between blood clot incidents and the vaccine in his investigation.
But he said the “clear” conclusion of the review was that the benefits of protecting people from the risk of death or hospitalization outweigh the potential risks. The issue deserves further analysis, the EMA said.
The EMA review, which covered 20 million people in the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area (EEA), which brings together 30 European countries, included seven cases of blood clots in various blood vessels and 18 cases of a disease. rare difficult to treat called venous cerebral sinus thrombosis (CVST).
AstraZeneca, which developed the shooting with Oxford University, said a review covering more than 17 million people who had been shot in the EU and Britain found no evidence of an increased risk of blood clots.
On Saturday, the company declined to comment on new cases in Denmark, but referred to a statement released Thursday in which its chief medical officer, Ann Taylor, said:
“Vaccine safety is paramount and we welcome the decisions of regulators that affirm the overwhelming advantage of our vaccine in stopping the pandemic. We are confident that, after careful decisions by regulators, vaccinations can resume in full force. Europe ”.
Report by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen; Edited by Alexander Smith and Frances Kerry