The central government decided to conduct a deeper review of post-vaccination side-effects from the Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine, news agency AFP reported on Saturday. The news came after several countries had suspended rollout of AstraZeneca shot over blood clot fears. However, no cases of blood clots have been reported so far in the country, AFP said.
Denmark, Norway and Iceland paused use of Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine as a precaution after isolated reports of recipients developing blood clots.
The local version of Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is known as Covishield. Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer by volume, joined hands with AstraZeneca to produce 1 billion doses of its COVID-19 vaccine.
“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,” N.K. Arora, a member of India’s national task force on COVID-19 told news agency AFP.
Arora said there was “no immediate issue of concern as 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, according to AFP.
“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, AFP reported.
India earlier granted emergency use approval to Covishield by Serum Institute of India and Covaxin by Bharat Biotech.A total of 16,39,663 beneficiaries that included health care workers (HCW) and front line workers (FLW) were vaccinated the first dose and 4,13,874 people received the second dose of the vaccine. So far, a cumulative total of 2,82,18,457 doses of the vaccine have been administered.
“Some states in the country have been reporting very high number of daily new Covid cases. Maharashtra, Kerala, Punjab, Karnataka, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu continue to report a surge in Covid daily cases,” the health ministry said in a statement on Friday.
India had registered 23,285 new cases in the last 24 hours, with the six states accounting for 85.6% of the new infections, it added.
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