A medical worker fills a syringe with AstraZeneca vaccine at Santa Caterina da Siena – Amendola secondary school in Salerno on March 13, 2021 in Salerno, Italy.
Francesco Pecoraro | Getty Images News | Getty Images
LONDON – Public preference for the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford has fallen since reports surfaced suggesting it may be linked to some cases of unusual blood clotting events.
An April study of nearly 5,000 adults in the UK, with Covid vaccine uptake high and the vaccination program well established, found that public preference for the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine has declined since March and there is a belief that that he caused blood clots to have increased.
The UK academic study found that 17% of the public now say they would prefer the AstraZeneca vaccine if given a choice – up from 24% towards the end of March.
And 23% of people now believe the AstraZeneca vaccine causes blood clots – up from 13% in March. However, the public are still the most likely to say that this claim is false (39%) or that they don’t know if it is true (38%).
The study, conducted April 1–16 by the University of Bristol, King’s College London, and the NIHR Health Protection Unit for Emergency Preparedness and Relief, found a “big difference” in beliefs before and after MHRA ( the UK Medicines Agency) announced on April 7th that there is a possible link between the vaccine and extremely rare blood clots.
The study found that 17% of respondents in the first week of this month thought this claim was true, compared with 31% who were asked about it.
Why autumn
Since the first clinical data was published, the vaccine has shown an average effectiveness rate of 70% (subsequent studies in the US have shown an effectiveness rate of 79%, and other studies have shown that the effectiveness rate increases with a larger gap between the first and second doses ) The fate of the AstraZeneca vaccine is mixed to say the least.
Continue reading: Dates, Doubts, and Disputes: A Timeline for AstraZeneca’s Covid Vaccine Problems
One of the recent hurdles for the AstraZeneca vaccine was a small number of reports of unusual, sometimes fatal, blood coagulation events that occurred in post-vaccinating people in Europe in February, causing several countries to suspend use of the vaccine.
The UK and EU drug regulators (the UK Medicines and Health Products Regulatory Authority and the European Medicines Agency) examined the reports and said that while there is a possible link between the vaccine and low incidence of blood clotting, the benefits of the vaccine are significant outweighing them Risks.
The Anglo-Swedish vaccine maker, British government and experts largely defended the vaccine, saying it protected millions of people by reducing Covid cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
In addition, experts tried to correlate the risk, saying the number of reported rare blood clotting cases with low platelets was about one case in 250,000 people vaccinated and one death in one million.
Britain is fortunate that it has traditionally received high levels of public support for vaccination. The vaccine preference survey found that, despite the growing belief that it was associated with blood clots, the AstraZeneca vaccine did not affect general confidence in vaccines in general. 81% say vaccines are safe, compared to 73% who said so in late 2020.
Similarly, views on how well vaccines work have changed: 86% say they are effective, up from 79% in November and December 2020.
However, surveys have shown that the public perception of the AstraZeneca vaccine has deteriorated in mainland Europe, and there is scattered evidence that people in the EU are using the AstraZeneca vaccine (referred to as the “Aldi” vaccine after the low-cost food chain will) because in favor of the coronavirus vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech, which also prevails when EU vaccinations are introduced.
Continue reading: “The damage is done”: Europe’s caution against the AstraZeneca vaccine could have far-reaching consequences
Moderna’s shot and Johnson & Johnson’s shot have also been approved for use in the EU and the UK, but have been less widely used, EU vaccination data show.
Hesitation to vaccinate can apparently work both ways. A British doctor reported in the Evening Standard newspaper in January that some of his patients had turned down the opportunity to receive the Pfizer vaccine, saying they would “wait for the English one.”
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