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* AstraZeneca vaccine halted after reported blood clots
* Over a dozen EU countries suspend its use pending probe
* Risk to public health of delaying shots is greater-experts
By Giulia Segreti and Caroline Copley
ROME/BERLIN, March 16 (Reuters) - France expressed hope
European medical experts would clear up questions over the
safety of AstraZeneca's COVID-19 shot on Thursday, as
experts warned the decision by major European states to stop
using it posed a greater risk to public health.
In a coordinated step, the European Union's largest members
- Germany, France and Italy - suspended the use of AstraZeneca's
vaccine on Monday pending the outcome of an investigation by the
bloc's medicines regulator into isolated cases of bleeding,
blood clots and low platelet counts.
They were joined by Sweden and Latvia on Tuesday, bringing
to more than a dozen the number of EU countries that have acted
since reports first emerged of thromboembolisms affecting people
after they got the AstraZeneca shot.
The World Health Organization and European Medicines Agency
have joined AstraZeneca in saying there is no proven link.
"The choice is a political one," Nicola Magrini, the
director general of Italy's medicines authority AIFA told daily
la Repubblica in an interview.
Magrini called the AstraZeneca vaccine safe and said its
benefit to risk ratio was "widely positive". There have been
eight deaths and four cases of serious side-effects following
vaccinations in Italy, he added.
French Health Minister Olivier Veran also told reporters
that the risk-reward ratio for the vaccine remained positive.
"We expect some kind of verdict from the European scientific
community by Thursday afternoon, allowing us to resume the
campaign," Veran said. France's vaccination chief Alain Fischer
said he expected the suspension to be temporary.
Governments say they acted out of an abundance of caution,
with German Health Minister Jens Spahn stating on Monday that
the decision to suspend AstraZeneca was not political but based
on expert advice.
He acted after Germany's vaccine watchdog identified a
unusual number of cases of a rare cerebral vein thrombosis. Out
of 1.6 million people in Germany who had got the AstraZeneca,
seven fell ill and three died.
The risk of dying of COVID is still orders of magnitude
greater, especially among those most vulnerable such as the
elderly, said Dirk Brockmann, an epidemiologist at the Robert
Koch Institute for Infectious diseases.
"In the risk groups the risk of dying of COVID is much, much
higher. That means one is probably 100,000 times more likely to
die of COVID than because of an AstraZeneca vaccine," Brockmann
told ARD public television.
(Additional reporting by Sudip Kar-Gupta and Matthieu Protard
in PARIS; writing by Douglas Busvine; editing by Philippa
Fletcher)
