LONDON – It is a tragedy that has claimed millions of victims all over the world, but it is useless to hide that, at least on social media and in chats on WhatsApp, the vaccine issue AstraZeneca, suspended by various European countries, but fearlessly administered to 10 million Britons by now, arouses some irony. Is it a Brexitian serum, which only works for the British while it hurts the Europeans? Or is the different reaction to be traced back to the “stiff upper lip” of His Majesty’s subjects, the impassivity that made them say, during the bombing of the Blitz, “keep calm and carry on”, keep calm and carry on? Or finally it is the result of excessive knowledge in the medical field, and consequently concern for diseases of all kinds, on the part of peoples like the Italians, who are afraid even of “blows of air” for their children, as ironized the Bbc a few years ago, while mothers in London or Liverpool don’t even know what they are? Learned conversations about gallbladder stones are heard on trains in Italy. On this side of the Channel the average man has no idea where he is.
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“Little evidence against the vaccine”
But leaving aside the jokes, out of place after a year of frightening pandemic, the question remains: why Italy, Germany, France, Spain, have suspended the inoculation of the AstraZeneca vaccine against Covid-19 and Britain continues it? “In our country 11 million people have received the first dose of AstraZeneca,” says Professor Anthony Harden, vice president of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization, the agency that advises Boris Johnson’s government on vaccinations, “and we have not registered any palpable differences in the number of emboli since the introduction of the vaccine onwards ”. Another government agency, the Medicines and Healtcare Regulatory Authority, says it is working closely with European drug regulatory authorities by examining thrombosis cases reported so far, “but the evidence gathered does not suggest the vaccine is the cause.” .
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Astrazeneca itself, a British-Swedish multinational, has announced that, among the people who have been administered 17 million doses of its vaccine throughout Europe, there have been 15 cases of thrombosis and 22 of pulmonary emboli: “A number much lower than what one would expect to naturally occur among such a large population, and similar to that found among those who have received other Covid vaccines ”.
You administer millions of doses
In Great Britain about 25 million first doses have been administered so far. Of these, just under half were AstraZeneca. Among those who were inoculated the latter, 54,180 cases with adverse reactions were reported, equal to 0.55 percent of the total, which mostly include minor or moderate symptoms such as some line of fever, fatigue, migraine, exceeded generally within a few days. The most serious reactions, including anaphylaxis or an allergic form of varying intensity, were 194 in all, equal to 0.002 percent of the total. There have also been 275 “suspected deaths”, 0.0028 per cent: the investigations by the British medical authorities carried out so far, however, have not linked any of these cases to inoculation with the AstraZeneca vaccine: “The vast majority of deaths ”, the official report states,“ occurred in patients with serious chronic health conditions ”. It means that those victims did not lose their lives to the vaccine, but to pre-existing diseases.
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Full confidence of the British government
Faced with these numbers, Downing Street has reconfirmed full confidence in the AstraZeneca vaccine: “Personally I would be ready to have AstraZeneca or Pfizer inoculated, for me it is indifferent,” Boris Johnson said yesterday. Why, then, in the face of the same data, supported by the World Health Organization which reiterated “the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe”, four major European nations have suspended its use? “It seems strange to give weight to an unproven, and according to biologists unlikely, link between the AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clots, rather than the fact that stopping vaccinations will kill people who would otherwise have been protected by Covid,” notes a Financial editorial this morning. Times.
Behind the “strangeness” of the decision of the four European governments, as the City newspaper calls it, there seem to be other reasons, at least seen from London. “The European caution on the Oxford vaccine” (at whose university the AstraZeneca vaccine was developed, in collaboration with the Italian laboratory of Pomezia), writes the Guardian today, “depends on something more than science”. That is, from other factors.
This morning the New York Times expresses the same impression, with a headline, “Vaccine suspension in Europe appears to be driven by politics as well as science”, similar to the Guardian: “When it became clear that Germany would suspend vaccination with the ‘AstraZeneca, pressure has grown on other countries to do the same, for fear of appearing imprudent and to remain united “.
The progressive London newspaper Guardian cites two of these “political” and unscientific factors. The first is the generally lower confidence in vaccines in countries such as France, which has a low vaccination rate even for measles, and Germany, where doubts (later denied) immediately circulated about the effectiveness of AstraZeneca for those who have more. 65 years: this makes it necessary, on the part of the governments of Paris and Berlin, to be more cautious before approving a vaccine, in order to then be able to convince the population to inoculate it. “And the other reason for the suspension of AstraZeneca could be the supply,” the article continues. “There are large stocks of vaccines in the UK. In continental Europe, no. AstraZeneca recently cut its shipments again to about a third of what was promised (Europeans, ed.). Suspending the vaccine is easier in Europe – concludes the Guardian – because in any case it is not available in large quantities ”.
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