At least three European Union countries are holding AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine in abeyance even after the bloc’s drug regulator said it was safe.
Denmark, Norway and Sweden said they would wait until next week to decide whether to resume firing the shot after several people who received it developed blood clots.
They were among more than a dozen EU countries that suspended vaccines against AstraZeneca while the European Medicines Agency was investigating cases of blood clots, some of which were fatal.
The agency concluded on Thursday that the British drug manufacturer’s vaccine does not increase the overall risk of blood clots, which led several countries – including Italy, France and Germany – to announce that they would remove it from the shelf.
But the three Scandinavian countries were more cautious, saying they wanted to end their own national revisions.
Health officials in Denmark said they would not decide whether to continue their implementation of AstraZeneca until after the two-week break ended. The country announced the suspension last week after a 60-year-old vaccinated woman developed “highly unusual symptoms” before dying from a blood clot.
“It is important that together with EMA and other drug regulatory authorities we take our time to thoroughly evaluate such reports,” Tanja Erichsen, director of pharmacovigilance at the Danish drug agency, said in a statement on Thursday .
Both Norway and Sweden said they would take into account the EMA’s findings as they consider whether to restart vaccines against AstraZeneca.
Officials noted the severity of some of the blood clot cases. The EMA, however, said they were rare: only 25 cases of blood clots had been reported as of Tuesday of the nearly 20 million Europeans who had been shot.
“Due to the situation with several serious cases in Norway, we want to thoroughly review the situation before concluding,” said Geir Bukholm, director of the Infection Control Division at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.
The three countries differ from their Nordic neighbor, Finland, which never stopped using the AstraZeneca vaccine. Like the World Health Organization and AstraZeneca, health officials noted that there was no evidence that the shot increased the risk of blood clots.
Shares in the United States of AstraZeneca rose about 0.6 percent in early trading on Friday to $ 49.64 as of 7:40 p.m.