Irish regulator hopes to lift vaccine pause in a week
Ben Quinn - The GuardianThe chair of Ireland’s National Immunisation Advisory Committee (NIAC), Professor Karina Butler has been speaking about the temporary suspension of the Astrazeneca vaccine in Ireland, which she said was “necessary.” She hoped to be able to say in a week that the regulator had “acted out of an abundance of caution.”
She said that there had been an alert from Norway to Ireland’s Health Products Regulatory Authority about what seemed like a cluster of four “very serious clotting events.” Three were in the brain and one was fatal.
Then the question was, was there the possibility of a relationship with the vaccine. Something that was rare but very serious could very serious outcomes,” she told Irish media outlet Virgin Media News.
“So with that the question was, where does the balance lie? But this is a safety signal. We don’t have the details yet, whether these events occurred in people who had other reasons having them happen. We don’t fully have the information yet are very complicated events are happening at a frequency that is greater than you would expect in a non vaccinated population.”
“But they do seem to have clustered together at a level and in younger people - when I say young I mean less than 65 - where we wouldn’t necessarily have expected them to.”
Above all, she said that the regulator wants confidence to remain high and for people to be assured. She said she hoped the regulator would be able to say in a week that it had acted out of “an abundance of caution.”
Here’s Butler speaking to Gavan Reilly on Virgin Media News:
Zara Nic an Rí:
#NEW “Very difficult to pause, but the right thing to do” -NIAC’s Prof Karina Butler tells @gavreilly the HPRA received an alert from Norway last night “A cluster of 4 very serious clotting events..3 of which involved clots in the brain, 1 fatal” ...
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