Public health expert says there is NO evidence uptake of AstraZeneca jab is slowing in UK

There is no evidence that the uptake of AstraZeneca jab is slowing in the UK despite European countries pausing their rollout of the company’s vaccine, a public health expert has claimed.

Professor Linda Bauld of Edinburgh University said all studies indicated the jab was safe and effective, while the fact different countries were reviewing their position was a sign that the system was working.

Germany has suspended use of the AstraZeneca vaccine for people aged under 60 due to fears of a link with rare blood clots.

On Friday, the Dutch government also said it would temporarily halt AstraZeneca jabs for people under 60, after it received five reports of blood clots with low blood plate counts following vaccinations. 

It comes as the MHRA insisted there is no evidence of a link between the AstraZeneca jab and blood clots.

Seven people in Britain have died of a blood clot on the brain after having an AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccines out of 18.1million doses, the regulator revealed.

Speaking to the BBC’s Good Morning Scotland radio programme, Professor Bauld said reports of blood clots were ‘very rare’ and a direct link to the vaccine was very unlikely. 

Professor Bauld said: ‘These kinds of pauses and reviews are a sign that the system is working.

‘Because when you see either deaths or unlikely adverse events that you wouldn’t anticipate or you didn’t see in the trials it’s reasonable for regulators to look at this.

‘The MHRA is still consistently saying there’s no cause for concern and that is absolutely the message to people.’

She added: ‘It doesn’t look from the behavioural response, the surveys I’ve seen, that it’s affecting uptake in the UK and that’s really important.’

Professor Bauld said she had recently received her blue letter inviting her for vaccination and she was ‘really looking forward’ to it.

It comes as the MHRA revealed just seven people in Britain died of a blood clot on the brain after having an AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccines out of 18.1million doses. 

It has also emerged that young people are up to 35 times more likely to die of Covid than to develop the type of brain blood clot that European officials fear could be caused by AstraZeneca’s jab, figures suggest.

German medics have seen one case of CVST — a type of rare brain blood clot that can cause strokes — in every 90,000 people to receive the vaccine, and say that is higher than expected. It is equal to a rate of 0.0012 per cent.

The UK’s MHRA regulator last night announced it has seen 30 cases and similar clots after 18.1million doses – around one in every 600,000 people (0.00017 per cent).

For comparison, Cambridge University academics tracking the Covid outbreak say the risk of dying of Covid for 25 to 44-year-olds is 0.04 per cent — around 33 times higher than even Germany’s incidence of CVST.

CVST, or cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, is a blockage in a vein that carries blood away from the brain and it can lead to strokes or bleeding inside the skull.

And even under-25s, who have a vanishingly small risk of being killed by coronavirus, may be four times more likely to die than to develop the condition after getting the AstraZeneca vaccine.   

The UK’s health watchdog said on Thursday night it hadn’t seen CVST cases in people who got the Pfizer jab but there was still no proof the AstraZeneca vaccine is raising the risk. 

This may be because different groups of people are getting different vaccines. 

Germany this week went against the European regulator’s advice and banned the AstraZeneca jab for under-60s because it fears a link to the condition. 

Scientists say the balance of risk is ‘very straightforward’ and clearly in favour of vaccination because of the ‘extreme rarity’ of CVST cases. 

Officials in Frankfurt recorded 31 cases of the condition among 2.7million people to have been given the AstraZeneca jab and have been alarmed by the number.

But this is a rate of just 0.0012 per cent. By comparison, experts estimate the risk of dying of Covid for 25 to 44-year-olds is 0.04 per cent – 33 times higher. 

For 15 to 24-year-olds the Covid death risk is 0.005 per cent, making it four times more likely. 

Forty under-20s have died in England, out of 86,351 in total, along with 598 20 to 40-year-olds.  

And the main benefit of giving the vaccine to younger people is that it protects elderly members of society, whose risk of death is much higher, and therefore allows ministers to loosen lockdown rules.

Professor Adam Finn, a University of Bristol researcher and government adviser on vaccines, said: ‘The extreme rarity of these events in the context of the many millions of vaccine doses that have been administered means that the risk-benefit decision facing people who are invited to receive Covid vaccines is very straight forward: receiving the vaccine is by far the safest choice in terms of minimising individual risk of serious illness or death.’

Comparing the rates of CVST to coronavirus death is tricky for a number of reasons, including that it’s so rare data aren’t clear, and that more people will get a jab than catch coronavirus.

Regulators also don’t break down the CVST cases by age, although they are thought to be more common among young adult women. 

And the fatality rates for coronavirus, estimated by Cambridge University experts only include people who get the virus. 

This means the average person’s actual risk of dying from coronavirus is significantly lower than the estimate because not everyone catches it – although if nobody took the vaccine, the likelihood of them catching it one day is far higher. 

Most recent calculations by the Cambridge team suggest the risk of dying of Covid is lowest for toddlers and babies, at 0.00039 per cent, around one in 256,000.

It’s highest for over-75s, at 6.9 per cent, or one in 14. And overall, the risk is around 0.3 per cent, meaning that across the whole population around three in every thousand infected people die.

Another complication is that there is no proof the coronavirus vaccine causes CSVT, meaning the cases that happen may have occurred anyway.

If this is the case, the risk caused by the vaccine is effectively zero and the jab is infinitely safer than being unvaccinated.

But even if a link is established, it will be difficult to know how many cases are triggered by the jab in people who would not otherwise have developed CVST. 

And CVST is more often survived than it is fatal. Medics say if it’s spotted in time – before it blocks the vein – it can be simple to treat with blood thinners. 

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US, estimates that one in every 200,000 people of all ages develop CVST each year. 

The European Medicines Agency said on Wednesday, echoing data from Germany, that the risk appears to be one in 100,000 in under-60s who have had the AstraZeneca vaccine. 

But much of the data comes from Germany’s AstraZeneca vaccine patients, who are mostly young female adults, and young female adults are statistically more likely to get CSVT even when there is no vaccine around.

EMA director Emer Cooke said cases in women usually outnumber those in men by 10 to one.

The contraceptive pill and smoking may be risk factors for this – scientists are investigating the links. 

So without the large pool of men, elderly people and children to dilute the pool with their low CVST risks, the rate appears unnaturally high in the vaccinated group.  

In the wake of EU scare stories over the AstraZeneca jab, which came amid a row over supplies, the MHRA last month said there had only been five cases of CVST among 11million administered doses.

In Thursday’s update, which takes into account all adverse reactions recorded up until March 24, it put the count at 22.

The watchdog also revealed it had eight reports of other serious clotting events associated with low blood platelets.

The MHRA said: ‘Our rigorous review into the UK reports of a rare and specific type of blood clot is ongoing.  

‘On the basis of this ongoing review, the benefits of the vaccines against Covid continue to outweigh any risks and you should continue to get your vaccine when invited to do so.’

The tenuous links between the vaccine and CVST are still mired in confusion because experts in Germany and other countries where the jab has been halted claim the condition is most common in women.

But all five of the original cases in the UK were among men.

The MHRA did not offer any more details about the new 25 cases. It is unclear how many died.

Earlier this week, Germany announced it would stop giving AstraZeneca’s jab to under-60s because of the link to CVST.

It said the country had seen 31 cases out of 2.7million people given the jab. This suggests 0.0011 per cent of people who were vaccinated later developed the clot – around one in 90,000 people.

However, other major European countries have also restricted the jab to certain age groups, even though they have seen significantly fewer CVST cases despite vaccinating more people.

If the same rate of CVST in Germany had appeared in the UK, almost 200 people would have been diagnosed with it already because six times as many jabs have been used. 

The European regulator the EMA also revealed this week twice as many women had received AstraZeneca’s jab in Europe as men, before adding that the people normally most at risk of CVST are females aged 35 to 45. 

Until recently, Germany had banned the AZ jab for over-60s due to initial fears about blood clots. 

It raises the possibility that the rates of CVST among vaccinated people Germany can be explained by more women who are susceptible to the condition being targeted by German rollout.  

AstraZeneca insists there is no proof the jab causes blood clots and that rates are not higher than expected overall. 

Experts have said it would be unusual that the vaccine could make one ultra-specific type of blood clot more likely but not blood clots in general.  

Spain, France and Italy have recorded, at most, one CVST case per million patients despite using the jab on similar age groups to Germany.  

But scientists and regulators insist there’s still no evidence the vaccine is causing blood clots or any other severe side effects and that the risk of Covid is greater. 

It was also revealed yesterday that Australia is investigating whether AstraZeneca’s Covid jab is linked to blood clots.

Local media reported a 44-year-old man was admitted to a Melbourne hospital with possible clotting days after receiving the vaccine.  

Health chiefs said more details would come to light in the coming days and that there was no proof the jab was to blame. 

Although there isn’t any evidence that the blood clots are developing because of vaccinations, some academics have a theory that it is the immune reaction making it happen.

Research teams in Germany and Norway claim the blood clotting issue may be caused by the jab, in very rare cases, making the body attack its own platelets.

Platelets are tiny chunks of cells inside blood that the body uses to build clots to stop bleeding when someone is injured. But they can also make unwanted clots. 

Experts from Oslo and Greifswald University believe the jab could cause the body to produce antibodies – normally used to fight off viruses – which mistake platelets in the blood for foreign invaders and attack them.

To compensate, the body then overproduces platelets to replace those that are being attacked, causing the blood to thicken and raising the risk of clotting. 

They admitted they ‘don’t know why this is happening’.

But the researchers say the phenomenon is similar to one that can occur in heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT), when sufferers take a drug called heparin.

Experts say the condition has not been proven to be caused by the jab and may simply be showing up just because millions of people are being vaccinated and reporting their health conditions.

They added that, if spotted early, it could be diagnosed with a simple blood test and quickly treated with blood-thinners.

It comes after it was revealed last night that UK taxpayers pumped £21million into fitting out a Dutch vaccine factory to make AstraZeneca jabs before the EU threatened to ban their export from the continent.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock approved the multi-million pound investment in the Halix factory in Leiden with the guarantee that doses would be sent to the UK.

Initially, it was hoped that Brussels and London could split the jabs produced.

But a senior EU official has threatened to block all AstraZeneca supplies from entering Britain until the drugmaker ups its deliveries to the bloc – putting the factory at the centre of the row.

Thierry Breton – the EU’s internal market commissioner – said ‘zero’ AstraZeneca jabs made on the continent would be shipped across the Channel until the company fulfilled its commitments to Europe.

He said ‘there is nothing to negotiate’ between the EU and the UK.