AstraZeneca vaccine: Netherlands suspends use for under 60s

The Netherlands on Friday temporarily suspended use of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine for people under 60 following the death of a woman who had received a shot, the Health Ministry said.

About 10,000 scheduled appointments for vaccinations were to be scrapped as a result of the decision, news agency ANP reported.

The decision was made following new reports from medicine monitoring agency Lareb and discussions with health authorities, a Health Ministry statement said.

AstraZeneca said it was working with Dutch authorities to address any questions they had.

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“Authorities in the UK, European Union, the World Health Organization have concluded that the benefits of using our vaccine to protect people from this deadly virus significantly outweigh the risks across all adult age groups,” it said.

Dutch agency Lareb, which tracks medication side effects, said that it has received five reports of extensive thrombosis with low platelet counts after vaccinations with the AstraZeneca vaccine, including in a woman who died.

Lareb said the events had occurred 7 to 10 days after vaccination. “These are women between 25 and 65 years old. Three patients had extensive pulmonary embolisms. One died and one also had a brain haemorrhage,” it said.

Roughly 400,000 people were vaccinated with AstraZeneca in the Netherlands in the period and the reports “seem comparable to other reports in Europe,” Lareb said.

It came a day after Germany halted use of the vaccine for people under 60. The UK government said there have been 25 new reports of rare types of blood clots linked to AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine recently, adding to the numbers that have caused European countries to adopt precautionary measures.

The total number of cases as of March 24th is now 30, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency said in a statement Friday. Prior to that, the agency disclosed five cases on March 18th. There were no reports of the same reactions to the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, the agency said.

AstraZeneca’s vaccine, developed with the University of Oxford, is under mounting scrutiny and has faced dwindling support in Europe. Still, countries are counting on the shot to help them exit the pandemic, and millions of doses have been administered across the region.

The UK agency said that the 30 incidents were out of 18.1 million doses of AstraZeneca vaccine given by that date.

Earlier this week, the European Union’s drugs regulator said a link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and a rare type of blood clot is possible, identifying at least 62 cases of the condition.

The European Medicines Agency said its safety committee will probably issue an updated recommendation next week. – Reuters and Bloomberg