Denmark, Iceland and Norway announced Thursday the suspension of AstraZeneca vaccine injections, invoking the principle of "precaution" in the face of cases of blood clots in vaccinated people.

Bulgaria followed suit on Friday and Thailand delayed its campaign. 

The WHO said on Friday that there was "no reason not to use" AstraZeneca's Covid vaccine, after its use as a precautionary measure was suspended in several European countries.

"Yes we should continue to use the AstraZeneca vaccine," "there is no reason not to use it," Margaret Harris, a spokeswoman for the World Health Organization, told Friday. during a UN press briefing in Geneva.

This vaccine is the only one approved by the WHO with that of Pfizer-BioNTech, which is based on another technique.

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The vaccine called into question

Denmark, Iceland and Norway announced Thursday the suspension of AstraZeneca vaccine injections, citing the "precautionary" principle.

Bulgaria followed suit on Friday and Thailand delayed its campaign.

"The benefits of the vaccine continue to outweigh its risks and the vaccine can continue to be administered while the investigation of cases of thromboembolism is underway," for its part said Thursday evening the safety committee of the European Medicines Agency.

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Earlier in the day, the Danish National Health Agency, the first to announce a suspension decision, had called for caution in the face of "serious cases of blood clots forming in vaccinated people", although "in At present "no link between the vaccine and blood clots has been established.

Earlier this week, Austria stopped administering a batch of these vaccines after the death of a 49-year-old nurse from "serious bleeding disorders" a few days after being vaccinated.

The Anglo-Swedish laboratory and the British government reacted Thursday to defend a "safe" and "effective" vaccine.

No death

For her part, the spokesperson for the WHO, stressed that the experts of this organization were looking at the information of the formation of blood clots but noted that for the moment no cause and effect link had been found. .

"Any security alert must be investigated," she said.

“We still need to make sure that we study all safety alerts when we distribute vaccines and we need to review them, but there is no indication not to use it,” added Harris.

She also recalled that as of March 9, more than 268 million doses of Covid vaccines had been administered worldwide since the start of the pandemic, based on figures obtained by the WHO from the authorities. of each country.

"No deaths have been linked to the administration of vaccines against Covid-19 until this date," said the spokesperson.

Pillar of the Covax system

The vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford accounts for the bulk of the 347 million doses due to be delivered through the Covax system in the first half of this year.

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Any doubt or suspension of this vaccine - of which the doses intended for the Covax system are manufactured in India and South Korea - would have important consequences for vaccination campaigns in poor nations, which do not necessarily have any other choice and who have only just started them.

The Covax system, set up by the Alliance for Vaccines (Gavi), WHO and CEPI, the research arm of the mechanism, began distributing in late February in countries hitherto deprived of vaccine.