(Reuters) - Nearly a dozen countries resumed use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 shots on Friday as EU and British regulators said its benefits outweighed any risks. Reports of rare instances of blood clotting had temporarily halted inoculations.
No country in the European Union is on pace to reach its goal of vaccinating 70 percent of its population by September. Hundreds of millions of people across the continent are still constrained by some of the most severe coronavirus restrictions in the world, and millions more are facing the prospect of rules being tightened further to tackle a third wave of the coronavirus.
Germany, France and Italy temporarily suspended the use of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine on Monday, joining a growing list of nations that paused use of the vaccine in recent days over concerns that it might be tied to blood clots.
Leading public health agencies, including the World Health Organization, say that millions of people have received the vaccine without experiencing blood clotting issues, and they caution that experts have not found a causative link between the vaccine and the conditions. The company has also defended the vaccine as safe, amid the flurry of suspensions.
(Reuters) - Johnson & Johnson’s newly authorized vaccine has started shipping, while a highly transmissible variant of coronavirus first identified in the Brazilian city of Manaus has been detected in Britain for the first time.
BERLIN (AP) — Slow off the blocks in the race to immunize its citizens against COVID-19, Germany faces an unfamiliar problem: a glut of vaccines and not enough arms to inject them into.
* The World Health Organization is working with the European Commission to coordinate vaccine donations for other countries on the continent, the head of its European office said.
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