Vaccine Eeyoreism, European Edition

This suspension seems deeply misguided:

As a third wave of the pandemic crashes over Europe, questions about the safety of one of the continent’s most commonly available vaccines led Germany, France, Italy and Spain to temporarily halt its use on Monday. The suspensions created further chaos in inoculation rollouts even as new coronavirus variants continue to spread.

The decisions followed reports that a handful of people who had received the vaccine, made by AstraZeneca, had developed fatal brain hemorrhages and blood clots.

The company has strongly defended its vaccine, saying that there is “no evidence” of increased risk of blood clots or hemorrhages among the more than 17 million people who have received the shot in the European Union and the United Kingdom.

[…]

“We do not want people to panic,” the W.H.O.’s chief scientist, Soumya Swaminathan, said at a news conference, adding that no link had been found between the clotting disorders reported in some countries and COVID-19 shots. A W.H.O. advisory committee plans to meet on Tuesday to discuss the vaccine.

The European Medicines Agency, or E.M.A., said Monday that it would continue to investigate a possible connection between the AstraZeneca shots and blood clots or bleeding in the brain. But the agency said the numbers of such problems reported in vaccinated people did not seem higher than those usually seen in the general population. Germany, for instance, reported seven cases of a “rare cerebral vein thrombosis” out of 1.6 million people who received the vaccine there.

The American vaccine rollout has sometimes been frustrating, and it began with a completely checked-out president with no last-mile strategy at all. And yet the U.S. has administered 32 doses per 100 people, while Spain, France, Italy and Germany are all stuck at 11. Suspending vaccinations over what looks like a spurious relationship between blood clots and the vaccine in a handful of cases just compounds the problem. Whatever the initial problems, the lack of urgency in the American case has mostly gone. In the EU, though, things are still a mess, for reasons I don’t fully understand.

pic.twitter.com/AijXMFyxhD— John Mullahy (@JohnMullahy) March 15, 2021