Lithuania temporarily halts AstraZeneca vaccines

Lithuania has decided to temporarily suspended vaccination with the Covid-19 vaccine developed by AstraZeneca.

“Within the last hour, I received a recommendation from the State Medicines Control Agency, which, like other EU countries, has recommended suspending vaccination with AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine as a precautionary measure until the final conclusions of the European Medicines Agency on the safety of this vaccine are available,” Health Minister Arūnas Dulkys said at a news conference on Tuesday evening.

“This means that we will take the agency’s recommendation into consideration,” he added.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) will hold a special meeting to discuss the vaccine on Thursday.

Gytis Andrulionis, director of the State Medicines Control Agency, said the body decided to recommend temporary suspension after receiving three reports about incidents of thromboembolism.

“Over the last few days [...] we have received three reports about serious suspected unexpected adverse reactions related to thromboembolic events among patients vaccinated with AstraZeneca’s vaccine in Lithuania,” he said.

Gytis Andrulionis | BNS nuotr.

“We now do not have any proof whether the events were triggered by the vaccine or they were just coincidences. We send all the data to a joint network and they are being assessed jointly by the EMA,” Andrulionis added.

According to him, all the three events were reported in women over 80.

Lithuania has previously stopped using AstraZeneca vaccines from one particular batch after several adverse events were reported in Austria.

However, Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė and Health Minister Dulkys said today Lithuania would not suspend the vaccines.

Lithuania has so far received 115,700 doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine. Currently, over 41,000 of them remain unused. Lithuania also stores around 40,000 BioNTech/Pfizer vaccines and several thousand Moderna shots, according to Dulkys.