Blood clot is 'very uncommon AstraZeneca side effect'
The EU's medicines regulator says unusual blood clots ought to be listed as an extremely rare side effect of the AstraZeneca vaccine for Covid-19.
After a report looking at 86 European cases, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) concluded the benefits associated with the vaccine outweighed the risk.
The report reflected data on 25 million Europeans administered with the jab.
The EMA could not list specific risk factors such as age or gender, but most blood clot cases were women under 60.
Separately, the UK's vaccine advisory human body said that within-30s there were to be offered an alternative solution jab to AstraZeneca due to the blood clots issue. Some 79 persons had suffered rare bloodstream clots after vaccination by the end of March in the UK - 19 of whom got died.
And the World Health Organization's advisory vaccine safeness panel said on Wednesday that although a blood coagulum web page link was "plausible" it had been "not confirmed" and the cases were "very rare" among 200 million people vaccinated with AstraZeneca globally.
A lot more than 132 million Covid-19 infections have already been recorded around the world, along with an increase of than 2.8 million deaths, relating to Johns Hopkins University research.
There were two main components to its report - the hyperlink with blood clots and how this may affect vaccination programs.
The EMA had concluded there was a "chance for very rare cases of blood clots combined with low levels of blood platelets occurring inside a fortnight of vaccination" with the AstraZeneca jab.
Almost all of the 86 cases studied found in the European Economic Location (the EU, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein) up to 22 March were found in females under 60. Eighteen had been fatal.
But EMA executive director Emer Cooke said there is no available proof "specific risk elements such as for example age, gender, or previous health background of clotting disorders".
On the safety part, she said: "Our security committee... has verified that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in stopping Covid-19 overall outweigh the risks of side effects."
Ms Cooke added: "This vaccine has confirmed to be impressive - it prevents extreme disease and hospitalization, in fact it is saving lives."
AstraZeneca has said its analyses have found no causal website link with blood clots.
Ms Cooke said that a person "plausible description for these rare unwanted effects can be an immune response to the vaccine".
The condition is comparable to one seen in persons who have been treated with the drug heparin, a blood thinner used to avoid the forming of clots.
In some cases there has been a potentially dangerous immune-driven adverse reaction to the drug, resulting in a condition called heparin-induced thrombocytopenia, or HIT.
