AstraZeneca vaccine withdrawn after causing ‘unusual but rare blood clots’
AstraZeneca, a British-Swedish multinational Pharmaceutical and biotechnology company that manufactured a COVID-19 vaccine, Vaxzevria says the vaccine is being withdrawn worldwide. This comes months after the pharmaceutical giant admitted for the first time in court documents that the vaccine can cause very rare but life threatening injuries.
The drug maker has withdrawn the vaccine from European Union market and has gone an extra mile to voluntarily withdraw its “marketing authorisation”. The company’s application to withdraw the vaccine from the market was made on March 5th, 2024 and came into effect on Tuesday May 7th, 2024.
The decision to withdraw it brings the use of the jab, that was praised by former UK Premier, Boris Johnson who referred to its production as “a triumph for British Science” to an end. He went on to credit it for saving more than six million lives.
AstraZeneca said their vaccine, Vaxzevria was, however, being removed from markets for commercial reasons. It said the vaccine was no longer being manufactured or supplied, having been overridden by modified vaccines which are able to tackle new COVID-19 variants.
Vaxzevria vaccine was first given a nod for usage in January,2021 and in few weeks, concerns arose about the vaccine’s safety. Following that, a number of countries halted the use of the vaccine after what was described as ‘unusual but rare blood clots’ were detected in a number of people who were immunised using the same vaccine.
Fragmentary results from Vaxzevria’s first major trial, used by Britain to grant permission to the usage of the vaccine were surrounded by a manufacturing mistake that was not immediately acknowledged by researchers. Some countries, worried about effects of the vaccine and how well it would protect older people, restricted its use to only younger people. This was attributed to insufficient data about the same vaccine but the course was later reversed so that the elderly also took jabs of the vaccine.
Vaxzevria has come under intense survey recently due to a very rare side effect, that causes blood clots and thrombocytopenia. AstraZeneca admitted in court documents lodged with the High Court in the UK in February 2024 that the vaccine “can, in very rare cases, cause TTS”.
TTS – which stands for Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome – has been linked to at least 81 deaths in the UK as well as hundreds of serious injuries. AstraZeneca is being sued by more than 50 alleged victims and grieving relatives in a High Court case.
AstraZeneca vaccine doses, in billions were given to third world countries through a United Nations coordinated programme and was considered cheap, easy to produce and distribute. However, studies later revealed that the more expensive messenger RNA vaccines manufactured by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna provided better protection against COVID-19 and its many variants. This compelled a number of countries to switch to other shots, leaving the one manufactured by AstraZeneca.
