Yesterday, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) declared that the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine is safe and that its benefits hugely outweigh the risks. Following that announcement, many EU countries are set to resume use of the vaccine.
This newspaper has long had confidence in the safety and efficacy of this vaccine, not because of Britain’s role in its development, but because it has been proven to work in this country.
As of March 7, an estimated 11.7million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine had been administered in the UK. The company notes that, among the millions of doses given across this country and the EU, there have been 15 events of deep vein thrombosis and 22 occurrences of pulmonary embolism recorded, which is lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of that size.
It is understandable that governments and citizens wish to have total confidence in vaccines, and the EMA said it could not definitively rule out a link between blood clots and the AstraZeneca jab.
However, the greatest risk is not just that delays prolong the pandemic — indeed several parts of France are going into lockdown for a month beginning this weekend. It is that people lose faith in a safe, efficacious and vital vaccine.
Already there are reports of AstraZeneca vaccines sitting idle due to unfounded fears over its safety. The AstraZeneca vaccine may end up having an outsized role in the global effort to eradicate Covid, or at least reduce it to nuisance status. Not only is it highly effective in reducing risk of hospitalisation and death, it is cheaper and far more easily stored than the Pfizer vaccine.
Covid-19 remains a highly infectious and potentially fatal virus. Vaccines are our greatest weapon to defeat it. We must use all of those in our arsenal to do so.
