AstraZeneca: Benefits Increase With Age | …

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said on Friday that a review it carried out of the AstraZeneca covid-19 vaccine shows its benefits increase with age and these outweigh the risks despite rare cases of blood clots.

The European Commission had asked the EMA to conduct a new study on the vaccine developed by the Anglo-Swedish laboratory, after concerns from several European countries which had decided to limit its use to people over the age of 60 or 65 years after detection. cases of blood clots in vaccinated young people.

The study “shows that the benefits of vaccination increase with age” and that they “outweigh the risks,” said the European regulator. “The benefits of Vaxzevria (the name of the AstraZeneca vaccine) outweigh any risks in adults of all age groups,” the EMA added.

“Vaxzevria is effective in preventing hospitalizations, admissions to intensive care units and deaths due to covid-19”, defended the European regulator. “The most common side effects are usually mild or moderate and get better within a few days,” he says.

Medical authorities in different countries suspect that AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson’s covid-19 injectables, based on the same technology, cause a rare type of blood clot.

According to the EMA, 287 cases of clots have been recorded worldwide, including 142 in the European Economic Area (European Union, Iceland, Norway and Liechtenstein), among the millions of people who received the vaccine from the Anglo-Swedish laboratory.

With the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine, 25 clots were produced, 8 with Johnson & Johnson’s and 5 with Moderna’s, according to data released Tuesday by the European regulator. The EMA recently announced that this issue should be reported as a “very rare” side effect of AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines.