AstraZeneca vaccine has again come under suspicion as the three health workers in Norway who had recently taken the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine are being treated in the hospital for bleeding, blood clots and a low count of blood platelets, Norwegian health authorities said on Saturday.
On Thursday, Norway stopped the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine, after a comparable move by Denmark. Iceland later followed suit.
“We do not know if the cases are linked to the vaccine,” Sigurd Hortemo, a senior doctor at the Norwegian Medicines Agency told a news conference held jointly with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health. The three health workers were under the age of 50.
Read more: Three more people develop unusual symptoms upon AstraZeneca COVID-19 shots
The European medicine regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA,) would investigate the three incidents, Hortemo said. They have very unusual symptoms: bleeding, blood clots, and a low count of blood platelets,” Steinar Madsen, Medical Director at the Norwegian Medicines Agency told broadcaster NRK.“They are quite sick…We take this very seriously,” he said, adding that authorities had received notification of the cases on Saturday.
AstraZeneca told a review of its safety data including reported cases from over 17 million vaccine doses given had shown no evidence of an enhanced risk of pulmonary embolism, deep vein thrombosis or thrombocytopenia – having low levels of platelets.
“In fact, the reported numbers of these types of events for COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca are not greater than the number that would have occurred naturally in the unvaccinated population,” a company spokeswoman said.
Such trends were also not seen during clinical trials for the vaccine, she added.
Before Denmark and Norway stopped their rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine, Austria halted using a batch of the shots while reviewing death from coagulation disorders and an illness from a pulmonary embolism.
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