Blood Clotting Not Linked To AstraZeneca Vaccine: Oxford

London: While AstraZeneca is facing the heat from some European nations over blood-clotting issues, co-developer Oxford claims that there is no connection between with the vaccine.

Oxford Vaccine Group’s director Andrew Pollard on Monday said there is “very reassuring evidence that there is no increase in a blood clot phenomenon here in the UK, where most of the doses in Europe been given so far.”

“It’s absolutely critical that we don’t have a problem of not vaccinating people and have the balance of a huge risk, a known risk of COVID, against what appears so far from the data that we’ve got from the regulators — no signal of a problem,” he told BBC radio.

Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Ireland, The Netherlands are some of nations which have paused the vaccine rollout.

AstraZeneca on Sunday highlighted that 17 million doses of the vaccine have been administered and there was no evidence of increased blood clots. It said the 15 incidences of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and 22 events of pulmonary embolism reported was “much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population”.

The World Health Organization and the European Medicines Agency have both recommended that the vaccine not be paused.

The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine is marketed as Covishield in India and is made by the Serum Institute of India.