The data in this piece is correct as of the time of writing, on 17 March 2021.
A post on Facebook has claimed that 17 countries have “banned” the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, and the UK hasn’t. The post previously claimed that 12 countries had banned it, but has since been edited.
This is not correct. No country has outright banned the vaccine.
At the time of writing, 17 countries in Europe (Ireland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Germany, Portugal and Slovenia) have temporarily paused administering the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine. An 18th country, Romania, temporarily stopped giving it out but has now restarted.
Outside of Europe, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo have delayed rolling it out. Thailand had temporarily suspended it, but has now restarted vaccinations.
Most of these suspensions are pending results of an investigation by the European Medicines Agency (EMA) into blood clots in people after they received the vaccine, due this week. On 16 March, the EMA reportedly said it remained “firmly convinced” that the benefits of the jab outweighed the risks. On 17 March, the World Health Organisation said that it “considers that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine outweigh its risks and recommends that vaccinations continue.”
Most of these suspensions were announced since the Facebook post was first written on 13 March. It’s possible the creator of the post was also referring to the fact that a number of EU countries have suspended the use of a certain batch of the vaccine, labelled batch ABV5300.
In Austria, following vaccinations from the ABV5300 batch, two people suffered from blood clot related issues: one died as a result of “severe coagulation disorders” and the other is recovering from a pulmonary embolism. Although there is no evidence of a causal relationship between these issues and the vaccine, the country’s Federal Office for Safety in Health Care said that to be on the safe side, the remaining stocks of the affected vaccine batch would no longer be distributed or vaccinated.
In total, 17 countries received the batch and, of these, four countries in the EU (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Luxembourg) specifically suspended use of this batch. The EMA says this is a “precautionary measure, while a full investigation is ongoing”. As we’ve mentioned, Latvia, Lithuania and Luxembourg have since temporarily suspended use of the AstraZeneca vaccine in general.
Italy banned a different batch, AB2856, and later suspended use of the vaccine on 15 March.
Does the AstraZeneca vaccine cause blood clots?
There is no evidence showing that it does.
As of 10 March, 30 cases of “thromboembolic events” (meaning an issue relating to a blood clot blocking a blood vessel) had been reported in the five million people who had received the AstraZeneca vaccine in the European Economic Area (all EU member states, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway). As the EMA itself said, “The number of thromboembolic events overall in vaccinated people seems not to be higher than that seen in the general population.”
Some of these people would be likely to experience those issues anyway, at a background rate of around 1 in 1000 (or likely higher in the vaccinated group as they are largely older).
So in a group of about five million people, as Professor David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University calculated, we’d expect about 100 people a week to have issues with blood clots, which is far more than the 30 seen over a month or so following the AstraZeneca vaccine.
In clinical trials of the AstraZeneca vaccine, where healthy people were given the vaccine, and a control group were given either a placebo or meningitis injection, there were slightly fewer serious adverse events in those who got the actual vaccine.
Many of the governments that have temporarily suspended the vaccine have said that it is too early to say there is any evidence of a link, and say they have suspended it as a precaution.