SPAIN has halted its roll-out of the AstraZeneca or 'Oxford' vaccine for at least 15 days pending further investigation after the country's first case of blood clots recorded in a person to whom it had been administered.
Health authorities in national government stress they do not believe there is cause for alarm, since only one case of thrombosis out of 939,534 people given the AstraZeneca vaccine has been registered, but has temporarily withdrawn it pending a European Medicines Agency (EMA) inquiry.
Denmark was the first country to stop administering the 'Oxford' vaccine, followed swiftly by Norway and, since then, by the Republic of Ireland, Italy, Iceland, Bulgaria, Germany France, and The Netherlands.
Some countries have opted just to shelve doses of the batch associated with thrombosis cases, including Luxembourg, Romania, Austria, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
The UK, where the vaccine was developed, has not done so.
At first, although Spain had decided not to give the AstraZeneca jab to anyone of 55 years old or over due to 'insufficient data' and 'inconclusive results' about its safety and effectiveness above this age – purely because not enough volunteers in this category were able to participate in clinical trials, not because of any adverse reactions or reduced immunity detected in these – its health authority opted not to halt the roll-out.
Health minister Carolina Darias did not consider the risk to be worth stopping the crucial process of immunising the population as quickly as possible so life could return to normal – only 10 cases of blood clots in 17 million doses administered had been detected.
But when Spain reported case number 11 – albeit literally one in a million – Sra Darias decided to delay further inoculation with the AstraZeneca drug 'temporarily' until the EMA had analysed the situation.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com