Austria will stop using AstraZeneca's vaccine, citing delivery problems and its bad reputation, after similar decisions by Norway and Denmark who had, for their part, justified their choice by the rare but serious risks of complications .
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“
We will probably continue giving first doses until early June, then that's it. (...) AstraZeneca will be abandoned
”, declared the Minister of Health, Wolfgang Mückstein, in a television program late Monday evening on the private channel Puls 24.
In addition to the persistent delivery delays, which triggered the opening by the European Commission of legal proceedings against the Swedish-British laboratory, the minister highlighted the reluctance in the population, because of very rare cases of thrombosis that the vaccine can cause. In this regard, this professional doctor considered that it was a "
safe vaccine offering high protection
", in accordance with the opinion of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the World Organization (WHO) who consider its benefits to outweigh the risks.
Austria, where a third of the population of 8.9 million has so far received a dose, has already ordered millions of vaccines for 2022 and 2023 and relies mainly on BioNtech / Pfizer and Moderna, which use messenger RNA technology. Denmark had decided in mid-April to abandon AstraZeneca, the first country in Europe to give up, followed in May by Norway. Most of the European countries which continue to use the serum have made their use age-specific.
