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Admitted it can cause blood clots / AstraZeneca withdraws its vaccine worldwide

2024-05-08 08:27:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

AstraZeneca is withdrawing its Covid-19 vaccine worldwide, months after the pharmaceutical giant admitted the drug can cause rare but life-threatening injuries.

The British-Swedish manufacturer has already withdrawn the EU marketing authorization for the vaccine, called Vaxzevria, from 2021. The authorization is the approval to market a medicine in EU member states. The recall was due to a "surplus of available updated vaccines" against new variants of the new coronavirus, the company said.

The application to withdraw the vaccine from the EU was made on March 5 and entered into force on May 7.

"As multiple Covid-19 vaccines have since been developed, there is a surplus of updated vaccines available," AstraZeneca said, adding that this led to a drop in demand for Vaxzevria, which is no longer manufactured or supplied. .

AstraZeneca recently admitted that its vaccine, originally called Covishield, can cause rare side effects such as blood clots and low blood platelet counts, The Telegraph reported.

The admission came after the company was sued in the UK, which claimed the vaccine had caused death and serious injury, and sought up to £100 million in damages for around 50 victims.

"It is accepted that the AZ vaccine, in very rare cases, can cause TTS. The causal mechanism is unknown,” AstraZeneca said in court documents in February, the newspaper reported.

TTS is thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, which is characterized by blood clots and low blood platelet counts in humans. AstraZeneca's vaccine was developed in collaboration with the University of Oxford and produced by the Serum Institute of India. It was widely administered in over 150 countries, including Britain and India.

Several studies conducted during the pandemic found that the vaccine was 60 to 80 percent effective in protecting against the new coronavirus.

But later research found it caused fatal blood clots in some people.

AstraZeneca's admission that the vaccine could prove potentially lethal contradicted its insistence in 2023 that it "would not accept that TTS is caused by the vaccine at a generic level".

The World Health Organization also confirmed that the vaccine can have fatal side effects. "A very rare adverse event called Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome, which involves unusual and severe blood clotting events associated with low platelet counts, has been reported after vaccination with this vaccine."/ CNA