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Let’s start this off with a reminder that almost every single medication and vaccine on the market comes with the risk of side-effects – even commonly used and seemingly innocuous meds like Panado.

With that out of the way, on with the story.

The Republic of Ireland temporarily suspended the use of the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine following a report from Norway of patients developing blood clots post-inoculation.

Health Minister Stephen Donnelly said it was “precautionary”.

Northern Ireland has said that they will continue to use it.

The Netherlands has now become the latest country to suspend the use of the vaccine, with the Dutch government, via BBC, saying that the move will last until at least March 29.

In total, reports DW, “Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Iceland have suspended the use of the vaccine, while Austria stopped using a batch of shots last week”.

All of the countries undertaking this step have not excluded the possibility of using the vaccine completely, but have launched investigations into the side-effects to determine their correlation with the inoculations.

In a statement, AstraZeneca said there was no evidence of an increased risk of clotting due to the vaccine. Across the EU and the United Kingdom, there had only been 15 events of deep-vein thrombosis and 22 incidents of pulmonary embolism reported among those vaccinated.

“Around 17 million people in the EU and UK have now received our vaccine, and the number of cases of blood clots reported in this group is lower than the hundreds of cases that would be expected among the general population,” said Ann Taylor, the firm’s chief medical officer.

“The nature of the pandemic has led to increased attention in individual cases and we are going beyond the standard practices for safety monitoring of licensed medicines in reporting vaccine events, to ensure public safety.”

While we’re focused on COVID-19 at the moment, people are still suffering from other diseases. As more and more people are vaccinated, the chances that complications from those diseases will coincide with the timing of the vaccine being issued increases.

As Dr Peter English, a retired consultant in Communicable Disease Control, and former Editor of Vaccines in Practice Magazine told Science Media Centre:

“When a vaccine is administered to millions of people, it is inevitable that some adverse events – that would have happened anyway – will happen shortly after vaccination. When deciding whether the events are a coincidence, or caused by the vaccine, you have to consider biological plausibility and whether there are more events than you would expect without vaccination.”

Prof Stephen Evans, Professor of Pharmacoepidemiology, responded to the vaccine suspension in Norway, with the following:

“What these authorities do not make clear is that these coagulation disorders are very common in patients with COVID-19. Unless we are sure that those who suffered these unfortunate events very definitely did not have COVID-19 then it would seem to be premature to suggest it was the vaccine that caused these events.

In summary, unlike most medications and vaccines, scientists had to fast-track trials to ensure that the COVID-19 vaccine reached us sooner rather than later.

What this means is that if something that looks like a side-effect emerges, the rollout of the vaccine could be temporarily suspended while experts investigate.

South Africa abandoned the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine after complications arising from the efficacy of it against the COVID-19 variant 501Y.V2.

This had nothing to do with side-effects.

[sources:bbc&scimediacentre&dw]