Regulator Vouches for AstraZeneca, Despite Suspension by European Countries
The suspension impedes Europe’s already troubled vaccination campaign amid a third coronavirus wave. Europe’s top drug regulator said there was no sign that the shot had caused dangerous side effects.
A drive-through vaccination center in Milan on Monday, the day Italy suspended use of the AstraZeneca vaccine.Credit.Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times
Published March 16, 2021Updated March 23, 2021
LONDON After the European Union’s biggest countries suspended the use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, the continent’s top drug regulator pushed back hard on Tuesday against fears about the shot, saying there was no sign of its causing rare but dangerous problems, and strong evidence that its lifesaving benefits “outweigh the risk of the side effects.”
March 16, 2021 at 6:30 am
Months before the first COVID-19 vaccine was even approved, wealthy nations scrambled to line up hundreds of millions of advance doses. These would go to their citizens and no others. By the end of 2020, Canada had bought 266 million doses. That was enough to vaccinate all its people four times over. The United Kingdom snagged three times what its people needed. The United States, home to 330 million, reserved more than 1 billion doses and is now vaccinating more than a million people a day.
It’s a very different story in poorer nations. As of March 4, people in more than 80 countries have not yet gotten even one dose. Only 55 total doses were delivered to the 29 lowest-income countries; and all of them went to people in the West African nation of Guinea. Only a few countries in sub-Saharan Africa have begun regular COVID-19 vaccine programs.
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After failing to broker a deal with Pfizer Inc., Argentine President Alberto Fernandez was so desperate to secure COVID-19 vaccines that he rushed a passenger plane to Moscow in December