Vaccines

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/16/world/covid-19-coronavirus#halting-a-key-vaccine-across-europe-weakens-an-already-faltering-rollout

The suspension of the use of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine by most governments across Europe has further set back an already fraught inoculation campaign on the continent even as the bloc’s main drug regulator said there was no indication that vaccination has caused side effects such as blood clots.

No country in the European Union is on pace to reach its goal of vaccinating 70 percent of its population by September. Hundreds of millions of people across the continent are still constrained by some of the most severe coronavirus restrictions in the world, and millions more are facing the prospect of rules being tightened further to tackle a third wave of the coronavirus.

Millions of people in dozens of countries have received the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine with few reports of ill effects, and its prior testing in tens of thousands of people found it to be safe.

But recently, blood clots and abnormal bleeding in a small number of vaccine recipients in European countries have cast doubt on its safety, although no causative link has been found between the patients’ conditions and the vaccine. The reports have prompted more than a dozen countries to either partly or fully suspend the vaccine’s use while the cases are investigated. Most of the nations said they were doing so as a precaution until leading health agencies could review the cases.