AstraZeneca withdraws its anti-Covid vaccine worldwide, as it already did a couple of months ago in Europe. Officially the company justifies the decision by claiming there is “a surplus of updated vaccines available”. But the picture is a little more complex, it’s not just a matter of giving way to more up-to-date vaccines or coping with the drop in requests.
Last week the pharmaceutical company acknowledged for the first time in court that its drug can cause a very rare side effect, with potentially fatal complications. Outside the court it had already been specified: the information on the vaccine had been publicly updated in April 2021, with the authorization of the Medicine and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (the British medicines regulatory agency) to administer it anyway, including the possibility that, in very rare cases (in England 3 cases out of 100 thousand doses administered), it was capable of triggering thrombosis with thrombocytopenic syndrome.
What was written on the leaflet for three years was said aloud in front of a court of justice. Specifying – to be honest – that the syndrome can develop even in the absence of the vaccine and that its cause must be evaluated by experts individually, on a case-by-case basis. The World Health Organization (WHO) confirms that the AstraZeneca vaccine can have potentially fatal side effects “in very rare cases”, one in 10,000. And this was said even in the midst of the pandemic, when AstraZeneca’s imperfect vaccine seemed like a salvation (and for 6 million people around the world it really was). When Pfizer and others came out on the market, AstraZeneca was (where possible) downgraded: its efficacy percentages were lower than the products of other pharmaceutical companies. This, however, did not prevent it from being used in vaccination hubs. “In countries affected by the pandemic – the WHO has always admitted – the benefits of vaccination in protecting against Covid far outweigh the risks”.
The same company, on the same day it beats the retreat, is keen to point out that “our efforts have been recognized by governments around the world and are widely considered to be a fundamental component in putting an end to the global pandemic”. And at the same time, Codacons announces its victory: the ASL 3 of Genoa and the hospital medical commission of La Spezia have given «the green light to a substantial compensation in favor of a 37-year-old Genoese citizen who underwent the AstraZeneca vaccination in 2021 immediately reporting serious adverse reactions.” But while the empire seems to be falling to pieces, Giacomo Gorini, the Italian researcher who worked on the vaccine at the University of Oxford during the hardest days of the pandemic, restores order: «A vaccine that has been useful to us in times of emergency”.
And from the European Medicines Agency Ema Marco Cavaleri claims that it is all “in line with the expectations that vaccines no longer used and updated will be withdrawn, as per our indication”.
