Germany, France, Italy and other European countries announced on Thursday that they would resume using AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine after the European medicines regulator said the shot is "safe and effective" and not associated with a higher blood clot risk.
The WHO and Britain's health regulator have already said the vaccine was safe and it was far riskier to not get the shot as coronavirus cases are surging.
Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovenia and Bulgaria were the other countries who said they would start using the AstraZeneca vaccine again.
France on Thursday became the latest nation to toughen Covid restrictions, announcing a month-long limited lockdown for Paris and several other regions to try and stave off a third wave of infections that has overwhelmed hospitals.
The EMA's chief Emer Cooke said Thursday that after an investigation into the AstraZeneca shot, its "committee has come to a clear scientific conclusion: this is a safe and effective vaccine".
"The committee also concluded that the vaccine is not associated with an increase in the overall risk of thromboembolic events or blood clots," she added.
AstraZeneca's chief medical officer Ann Taylor said that "vaccine safety is paramount and we welcome the regulators' decisions which affirm the overwhelming benefit of our vaccine in stopping the pandemic".
The AstraZeneca shot was among the first and cheapest of the Covid-19 vaccines to be developed and launched at volume and is set to be the mainstay of vaccination programmes in much of the developing world.
“We trust that, after the regulators’ careful decisions, vaccinations can once again resume across Europe,” said AstraZeneca Chief Medical Officer Ann Taylor in a statement.
The move to stop administering the AstraZeneca shots had come as a major setback to the vaccination campaign in the 27-nation EU amidst a surge of coronavirus cases in the region. The inoculation drive in these countries was earlier hit because supplies of the vaccines fell behind schedule in the initial stage due to production problems. There were serious differences between Britain and the EU over the delays.
The director general of Italy’s medicine authority had set the cat among the pigeons by stating that the decision to suspend the use of Britain’s AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine by the Big 3 European nations–France, Germany and Italy– is a “political one” as the vaccine is safe.
This had given rise to lingering doubts over the issue as there were serious differences between the UK and European nations over the delay in providing the AstraZeneca vaccine. AstraZeneca had maintained that the delay in the delivery schedule had taken place due production problems. But the European countries alleged that they were being deliberately denied their quota of vaccines as Britain was cornering a larger share.
