Austria to stop using AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine due to rare side effects

Austria will stop using the vaccine AstraZeneca against coronavirus due to delivery problems and its bad reputation, following similar decisions by Norway and Denmark, which, for their part, stopped applying it due to the rare but serious side effects.

“We will probably continue to administer the first doses until the beginning of June, but that’s it,” later “AstraZeneca will be abandoned”, declared Health Minister Wolfgang Mückstein on Monday night on the private channel Puls 24.

In addition to the persistent delays in deliveries, which triggered the opening by the European Commission of legal proceedings against the Swedish-British laboratory, the minister highlighted the reluctance of the population, due to the very rare cases of thrombosis that the vaccine can cause. .

In this sense, Mückstein, a doctor by profession, considered that it is a “safe and highly protective vaccine”, according to the opinion of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the World Health Organization (WHO), who believe that its benefits outweigh the risks.

Austria – 8.9 million inhabitants, of which a third have already received their first anticovid injection – will continue to vaccinate with the Pfizer / BioNtech and Moderna vaccines, which use messenger RNA technology.

Denmark decided in mid-April to abandon AstraZeneca, becoming the first country in Europe to do so, and in May Norway took the same step.

Most European countries that continue to use the AstraZeneca vaccine have age limits.