World Health Organization (WHO) Vaccine safety experts, are meeting to review the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab.
This comes as a number of European countries have halted the vaccine rollouts, following cases of blood clots reported after the vaccine was administered.
However WHO says there is no evidence linking the vaccine to the blood clots.
WHO however said that investigations on reports of the blood clots are underway. WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier said, “As soon as WHO has gained a full understanding of these events, the findings and any unlikely changes to current recommendations will be immediately communicated to the public.”
The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is also meeting today to discuss the vaccine and the complaints about it. WHO director-general Tedros Ghebreyesus says Countries should continue using AstraZeneca jab.
They insist that the shot is safe and that countries should continue using it. WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan on Monday said, “We do not want people to panic and we would, for the time being, recommend that countries continue vaccinating with AstraZeneca. So far, we do not find an association between these events and the vaccine.”
EMA in a statement said, “many thousands of people develop blood clots annually in the EU for different reasons and the number of incidents in vaccinated people seems not to be higher than that seen in the general population.”
It added that “the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in preventing Covid-19, with its associated risk of hospitalization and death, outweigh the risks of side effects.”