By Bojan Pancevski and Jenny Strasburg BERLIN -- Germany, France and Italy joined a group of smaller European countries that have temporarily stopped administering Covid-19 vaccines made by AstraZeneca PLC, saying the move was precautionary amid a small number of cases of blood clotting reported on the continent. Denmark last week said it had paused AstraZeneca shots for two weeks following reports of blood clotting, and several other European countries quickly followed suit, saying they were doing so out of an abundance of caution. Norway, Ireland and the Netherlands are among countries that have paused vaccinating with AstraZeneca's shot. Health regulators in the U.K. and Europe, along with AstraZeneca and its vaccine development partners at the University of Oxford, say there is no known connection between severe clotting and the shot. AstraZeneca has said the number of cases of blood clotting among the roughly 17 million people in the European Union and U.K. who have received the shot is lower than for the general population.