Denmark are the latest country to suspend inoculations with the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine after reports of blood clots formed in several patients, one of whom has since died.
Denmark's Health Agency said on Thursday that it had not conclusively established a link between the clots and the vaccine, but said it had asked regional authorities to stop using the AstraZeneca shot whilst it investigates.
However, the mindset of health officials in Denmark mirrors that of most other countries who will plough-on with the vaccine programme despite these issues. Søren Brostrøm Director of Denmark's National Health Agency stated “We are in the middle of the largest and most important vaccination rollout in Danish history,” adding “Right now we need all the vaccines we can get. It is therefore not an easy decision to put one on pause.”
“Precisely because we are vaccinating so many people, we also need to respond promptly and carefully when we have knowledge of possible serious side-effects. We need to clarify this before we can continue using the AstraZeneca vaccine."
The health agency did not say how many reports of blood clots there had been, but Austria has stopped using the Oxford/AstraZeneca Vaccine while it investigates deaths from coagulation disorders (blood clots) and an illness from a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lung). Worst still for the Vaccine; six other European countries, including Estonia, Latvia, Luxembourg and Lithuania, have also reported halting the use of the AstraZeneca over serious adverse effects including a number of deaths that raised alarm.
The vaccine has been approved for use in adults by both the UK’s national medicines regulator MHRA and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) but has been plagued by controversy from the very beginning. During trials in September a patient died, that was previously fit and healthy (a prerequisite of the trial), causing the trial to be temporarily suspended. The vaccine failed its animal trials: Dr William Haseltine, a former Harvard Medical School professor who had a pivotal role in the development of early HIV/Aids treatments said about the trial failure; "All of the vaccinated monkeys treated with the Oxford vaccine became infected when challenged as judged by recovery of virus genomic RNA from nasal secretions," Writing in Forbes Dr Haseltine went on to say: "There was no difference in the amount of viral RNA detected from this site in the vaccinated monkeys as compared to the unvaccinated animals. Which is to say, all vaccinated animals were infected," Whilst Dr. Dolores Cahill, professor of Molecular Genetics, School of Medicine at University College Dublin said of the AstraZeneca trials: "..what happened in the animal studies, 20% or 50% or 100% of the animals died".
And not widely reported is that both mutant Covid strains announced by SAGE as being a 'cause for concern' emerged from the same two countries used to trial the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine.
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