No blood clot cases so far in India post AstraZeneca shots, we will act if we find any issue: Task force
In the wake of Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and Thailand temporarily halting vaccination with the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine following isolated reports of recipients developing blood clots, India on Saturday said it will carry out a deeper review of post-vaccination side effects from Covishield, the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine being manufactured by Serum Institute of India, next week.
“No cases of blood clots have been reported so far in the country, but we are looking at all the adverse events, particularly serious adverse events like deaths and hospitalisation. We will come back if we find anything of concern,” NK Arora, a member of national task force on Covid-19, told a news agency.
This new development took place even as the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday said there was no reason to stop using AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 jab.
India has been using the Indian version of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine called Covishield, as developed by SII, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by volume, and indigenous vaccine giant Bharat Biotech’s Covaxin in its vaccination drive.
Serum Institute had joined hands with AstraZeneca to manufacture 1 billion doses of the vaccine shot.
India has given at least 28 million shots in its vast vaccination programme, most of them Covishield. The Government has also gifted and allowed exports of millions of these jabs to around 70 countries over the last few weeks as a part of its vaccine diplomacy.
Arora said there was “no immediate issue of concern as the number of adverse events (in India) is very, very low. We are relooking at (adverse events that were reported) to see if there was any issue of blood clotting.”
“As of yesterday there were 59 or 60 deaths, and they were all coincidental,” the doctor said, adding hospitalisation cases were being re-examined.
“In fact there is a real effort from our side that once complete investigation is done, to put its results in public domain, on the Ministry of Health website,” Arora added. On Sunday, the WHO said its vaccines advisory committee was currently going through safety data and emphasised that no causal link had been established between the vaccine and blood clot.
So far, a cumulative total of more than 2.82 crore (2,82,18,457) vaccine doses have been administered in two phases — first, to frontline and healthcare workers, and second, to citizens above the age of 60 and co-morbid above 45 years.
Meanwhile, with India recording the highest number of daily coronavirus cases in 83 days on Saturday, the country could be heading towards a new wave that scientists say can be quelled by vaccinating the maximum number of people and following Covid-appropriate behaviour.
As red flags went up, the jury was out on whether it constituted a new wave of the pandemic. Scientists grappled with the why and how of the surge in cases but were agreed that adherence to Covid-19 protocols and escalating the vaccination drive to cover more people were necessary to control the rising trajectory of the disease.
Anurag Agarwal, director of the CSIR-Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology, said scientists at his institute are trying to understand if the rise in cases is due to more-transmissible variants of the virus or due to a lapse in precautionary measures followed by people. Though there is no clarity if a new wave of the pandemic is currently underway, some things are certain.
