Two hospital workers in Denmark fell seriously ill after getting the AstraZeneca vaccine, according to local reports. One of them has died.
The patients were admitted to a hospital with blood clots and brain hemorrhage. They began developing symptoms within 14 days of getting vaccinated, the authority that runs public hospitals in Copenhagen said, according to Reuters.
The Danish Medicines Agency said it’s investigating whether their condition was linked to the vaccine.
“The Capital Region of Denmark can confirm that two of our employees have been admitted with symptoms of blood clots in the brain and cerebral hemorrhage,” a spokesperson said in a statement shared with the Ekstra Bladet newspaper. “One has sadly passed away,” the statement added.
Last week more than a dozen European countries temporarily suspended the use of the vaccine after cases of rare blood clots were reported, leading scientists scrambling to find any relationship between the AstraZeneca shot and the disease.
Danish authorities put a break on the AstraZeneca rollout on March 11, after the death of a 60-year-old woman. She was diagnosed with a “low number of platelets, blood clots in small and large vessels, and bleeding,” according to TV2, a government-owned television station in Denmark.
According to The Associated Press, many countries — including Italy, Germany and France — have since resumed vaccination, after the EU’s drug regulatory agency said that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine outweigh its risks.
But Denmark, as well as its neighbors Sweden and Norway, said on Friday that health authorities need more time to evaluate reports of adverse reactions.
“The Danish Medicines Agency and other drug regulatory authorities in the EU have chosen to investigate if these rare but serious cases could be an adverse reaction to the vaccine from AstraZeneca,” Tanja Erichsen, the agency’s acting director of pharmacovigilance, said in a statement.
“The symptoms are unusual and they appear right after the vaccinations. It is our job to react in such cases. It is important that we together with (European Medicines Agency) and the other drug regulatory authorities take our time to evaluate this type of reports thoroughly,” she added.
On Saturday, Erichsen tweeted that, “We prioritize reports of suspected serious side effects such as these and examine them thoroughly to assess whether there is a possible link to the vaccine.”
The agency is in the “process of dealing with the two specific cases,” she added.
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