AstraZeneca is withdrawing its Covid-19 vaccine worldwide, months after the pharma giant admitted the drug could cause very rare but life-threatening injuries.
The British-Swedish drugmaker has already withdrawn its EU marketing authorization for the vaccine, branded Vaxzevria, since 2021. The authorization is the approval to market a drug in the EU’s member states.
The company said the withdrawal was due to a “surplus of available updated vaccines” against new variants of the novel coronavirus. The application to withdraw the vaccine from the EU was made on 5 March and came into effect on 7 May.
“As multiple variant COVID-19 vaccines have since been developed, there’s a surplus of available updated vaccines,” AstraZeneca said, adding that this led to a fall in demand for Vaxzevria, which is no longer manufactured or supplied.
The Telegraph reported that AstraZeneca recently admitted that its vaccine, initially called Covishield, could cause infrequent side effects like blood clots and low platelet counts.
The admission came after the company was slapped with a class action lawsuit in the UK, which claimed that the vaccine had caused deaths and severe injuries and sought damages up to £100m for about 50 victims.
“It is admitted that the AZ vaccine can, in sporadic cases, cause TTS. The causal mechanism is not known,” AstraZeneca said in court documents in February, the newspaper reported.
TTS is thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, characterized by blood clots and low blood platelet counts in humans.
AstraZeneca’s vaccine was developed in collaboration with Oxford University and produced by the Serum Institute of India. It was widely administered in over 150 countries, including Britain and India.
Some studies conducted during the pandemic found the vaccine was 60 to 80 percent effective in protecting against the novel coronavirus. However, subsequent research found that it caused some people to develop potentially fatal blood clots.
