Following a dispute earlier in the year between AstraZeneca and the EU over vaccine supplies, the bloc introduced regulations to allow member states to stop manufacturers exporting vaccines if they weren’t fulfilling their obligations to the EU. And the Italian government exercised this right for the first time recently, withholding a shipment of AstraZeneca vaccines destined for Australia. Then, just a few days later, Italy halted a batch of AstraZeneca vaccines from being administered so that it could investigate two deaths among recent recipients. Similar precautionary pauses have also taken place in a number of other European countries. But the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has said that blood clots don’t seem to be appearing in vaccinated people any more frequently than would be expected across the general population. In the case of Austria – one of the countries to have paused its rollout – the EMA’s preliminary view is that the AstraZeneca vaccine is not linked to blood clots that have been witnessed there, though the agency is continuing to monitor the issue across the continent.