the world health organization says
there's no reason to stop the use of the
oxford astrazeneca coronavirus vaccine
the statement comes after bulgaria
romania and thailand joined
three scandinavian countries in
suspending inoculations with this
particular vaccine
they were reacting to reports of blood
clots in some people who'd received the
shot although there is no evidence of
any link
the european medicines agency has also
backed the use of the astrazeneca
vaccine saying
the benefits do outweigh the possible
risks
well i've been talking about this to
professor paul hunter from the
university of east anglia's school of
medicine
and asked him what the data shows us
about potential
harmful side effects from this vaccine
in england and the united kingdom we
have what's called a yellow card scheme
so that whenever you give
a drug or or a vaccine to somebody and
they develop
an adverse event in in the time after
that you
generally if you don't know it's for
certain that it's not related to the
vaccine or the
drug you then fill out a yellow card and
these are collated
and i've looked at the most recent
analyses of both the
pfizer and the oxford astrazeneca
vaccines and both of them have reported
uh presence of um uh pulmonary
thromboembolism which is sort of blood
clots on the lung
uh at about um
12 to 15 uh reports so far
and and that's actually a lot less than
you'd expect
from normal uh incidents of the disease
in the populations being vaccinated so i
think
we can say that yes blood clots are
happening after vaccination but they're
almost certainly not
caused by the vaccinations so just very
briefly i want to pick up on what you
said
is it the case that there's just as much
risk or lack of risk with safe pfizer as
there is with astrazeneca
well the the data from the yellow card
schemes which i looked at this morning
uh gives i think the figures was about
15
thromboembolisms for pfizer and 12 for
um oxford astrazeneca which as i said
is a lot lower than you would expect
from
than the large number of vaccines that
have been given in the uk so far so
i think we can be pretty sure that
neither this
nor us oxford astrazeneca uh actually
increase the risk of anybody getting
thromboembolism
professor paul hunter