At least four European countries are keeping AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine on hold for now even after the European Union’s drug regulator said it’s safe to use.
Denmark, Norway and Sweden said they would wait until next week to decide whether to resume their rollouts of the shot after several people who received it developed blood clots.
And Finland halted its use of AstraZeneca’s vaccine on Friday after reporting two blood clot cases in people who were jabbed four to 10 days earlier. Both have medical risk factors associated with blood clots, officials said.
More than a dozen European nations suspended AstraZeneca vaccinations while the European Medicines Agency probed the blood clot cases, some of which were fatal.
The agency concluded Thursday that the British drugmaker’s vaccine does not increase the overall risk of blood clots, leading several countries — including Italy, France and Germany — to announce they would take it off the shelf.
But the four Nordic countries were more cautious, saying they wanted to finish their own reviews.
Health officials in Denmark said they would not decide whether to continue their AstraZeneca rollout until after the end of the two-week pause. The country announced the suspension last week after a 60-year-old vaccinated woman developed “highly unusual symptoms” before dying from a blood clot.
Stockholm’s City Hall is being converted to a COVID-19 vaccination center on Feb. 21, 2021. JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty Images“It is important that we together with EMA and the other drug regulatory authorities take our time to evaluate this type of reports thoroughly,” Tanja Erichsen, the Danish Medicines Agency’s acting director of pharmacovigilance, said in a Thursday statement.
Several people who received the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine have developed blood clots. Dinendra Haria/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty ImagesOfficials noted the severity of some of the blood clot cases. The EMA, though, said they were rare — just 25 blood clot cases had been reported as of Tuesday out of about 20 million Europeans who had received the shot.
“Due to the situation with several serious cases in Norway, we want to thoroughly review the situation before we make a conclusion,” said Geir Bukholm, director of the Division of Infection Control at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health.
Early morning commuters on Stockholm’s metro wear face masks on Jan. 7, 2021. JONATHAN NACKSTRAND/AFP via Getty ImagesFinland reversed course a week after saying it would continue to use AstraZeneca’s vaccine amid the blood clot fears. Like the World Health Organization and AstraZeneca itself, officials there noted on March 12 there was no evidence that the shot increased the risk of blood clots.
AstraZeneca’s US-listed shares were down about 0.1 percent at $49.29 as of 2:09 p.m. Friday.






