After the signature AstraZeneca recognized before the British courts that his vaccine against Covid-19, called Vaxzeria, can trigger adverse effects, will be discontinued starting this Tuesday, May 7, throughout the European Union. The company itself had even requested its withdrawal from the market at the beginning of March.
Since the vaccination campaign against this virus began, the drug manufactured by Astrazeneca – in collaboration with the University of Oxford – has been one of the most used in the world. However, it was later hit with a class-action lawsuit in the United Kingdom, brought by several people who claim to have suffered serious injuries as a result of receiving the dose.
“We are incredibly proud of the role Vaxzevria played in ending the global pandemic. According to independent estimates, in the first year of use alone, more than 6.5 million lives were saved and more than 3 billion doses were supplied worldwide,” says the letter published by AstraZeneca.
In this way, they added: “Our efforts have been recognized by governments around the world and are widely considered a fundamental component in ending the global pandemic.”
For its part, the firm disassociated itself from all legal proceedings that have been registered in recent months due to the side effects suffered by various patients. This is how they argued: “Given that multiple vaccines updated for Covid-19 variants, there is now a surplus of vaccines available. “This has led to a decrease in demand for Vaxzervria, which is no longer manufactured or supplied.”
The risks of having been vaccinated with Astrazeneca
The pharmaceutical company admitted that its drug can cause thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS) in “extremely rare” cases. According to a report she presented, the rate of this syndrome is 0.05 per 100,000 applications of the vaccine of Astrazeneca.
Despite that, the vaccine showed, as detailed in May 2021 to Public Health England (PHE), that two doses are between 85% and 90% effective against symptomatic disease, that is, which in terms of prevention is greater than this risk.
The infectologist Ricardo Teijeiro, from the Argentine Society of Infectious Diseases, pointed out: “Adverse events, unless they are known allergies to a product of the vaccine, are difficult to prevent or warn. In general, they are produced by the individual’s reaction process to the vaccine. Each person responds individually, and in some cases these events such as thrombosis can occur, which has immunological characteristics specific to each of us.”
Another Conicet researcher, Jorge Geffner, clarified: “The Astrazenecalike the others vaccines that were applied at the time of the pandemic and continue to be applied now, are safe and effective, but not exempt like any medication or therapeutic procedure from some significant side effect in a very small proportion of the people treated.”
