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Immunology expert says ‘rare’ side-effect of AstraZeneca was known back then
View(s):By Kumudini Hettiarachchi
The ‘rare’ side-effect of blood clots was reported after the AstraZeneca (AZ) vaccine was given against COVID-19 in 2021 and this disclosure is nothing new, said an immunology expert this week, pointing out that people under-40 in many countries were advised back then not to take this jab.
When contacted by the Sunday Times in the light of the battle now being fought in the British High Court over the ‘rare side effect’ issue, Prof. Neelika Malavige of the Department of Immunology and Molecular Medicine, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Sri Jayewardenepura, said that this was also possibly why AZ did not continue to update its vaccine including against the latest variants of SARS-CoV-2.
“The same thinking may have governed the decision not to use the vaccine as a booster dose after the initial vaccine series in many countries,” she explained.
Currently, in the United Kingdom, the pharmaceutical giant AZ has been dragged to the High Court in a class action claiming that its vaccine caused death and serious injury in dozens of cases. In 51 cases, victims and relatives are seeking damages worth up to £100 million.
When asked whether Sri Lanka had recorded these rare side effects, Prof. Malavige said that the side effects of vaccines given in Sri Lanka were documented by the Health Ministry’s Epidemiology Unit but she was not in possession of this information.
What was administered in Sri Lanka was COVISHIELD, the brand name for the vaccine developed by Oxford University and British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AZ. It was manufactured at India’s Serum Institute.
In Sri Lanka, health workers were the first to get the COVISHIELD jab at the end of January 2021, when India donated 500,000 doses under their ‘Vaccine Maithri’ initiative. Pic by Indika Handuwala
Dr. Upul Dissanayake, the current President of the Ceylon College of Physicians (CCP) and senior Consultant at the National Hospital of Sri Lanka (NHSL), told the Sunday Times that there were a few cases of such rare blood clots being reported after the AZ vaccine. As far as he could recall, there was only one death.
He said that a close relative of a retired health administrator had taken the AZ vaccine and gone on vacation, when she developed a bad headache. She had passed away later.
“Soon after, the Health Ministry set up a mechanism to treat these rare adverse events based on international protocols. A multi-disciplinary committee was set up to help treat this emergency in any part of Sri Lanka,” said Dr. Dissanayake.
Back in 2021, in an interview published in the Sunday Times of March 14, headlined ‘Prof. Malavige on second jab, concerns over AstraZeneca and more’, this expert stated that Denmark had halted the vaccination after reports of one person dying of blood clots with several others facing the same issue after getting the vaccine.
Norway and Iceland followed Denmark as they too were using the same batch of vaccines, while Italy and Romania had done so over safety concerns though they were using different batches, she said, adding that in Brazil, in October 2020, a participant in a clinical trial for AZ’s vaccine died, raising some concerns but it was found that he had not got the vaccine but a placebo (a substance which has no physical effects unlike the vaccine).
Here in Sri Lanka, health workers were the first to get the COVISHIELD jab at the end of January 2021, when India donated 500,000 doses under their ‘Vaccine Maithri’ initiative.
By March 2021, the first batch of vaccines, once again COVISHIELD, from the COVAX (COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access) Facility arrived in Sri Lanka.
In the UK, the first case against AZ had been filed in the High Court last year (2023) by father of two, Jamie Scott, who had suffered a permanent brain injury after developing a blood clot and a bleed on the brain after receiving the vaccine in April 2021.
Although AZ is contesting the claims, it has stated in legal documents that the vaccine “can, in very rare cases, cause TTS” (Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome – which could result in blood clots and a low blood platelet count).
Meanwhile, focusing on the boosters (3rd and 4th) and now even 5th and 6th doses being doled out against COVID-19 by pharmaceutical companies Pfizer and Moderna based in the United States of America (USA), Prof. Malavige said that AZ possibly had not developed boosters for the updated SARS-CoV-2 variants due to these rare side effects.
She said that the boosters developed by Pfizer and Moderna are on an mRNA platform as opposed to AZ’s viral vector vaccine. All susceptible people in the US, Europe, Australia and many other countries have been given the 5th and 6th doses in 2022 and 2023, against the latest Omicron variants of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This is because the mRNA platform was found to be safe and easy to update against the emerging novel variants.
The Pfizer and Moderna platforms, instead of using a weakened or dead virus, utilizes a molecule called mRNA (messenger RiboNucleic Acid which is involved in translating our genetic material which is DNA) necessary for protein production. The mRNA vaccine introduces a piece of mRNA that corresponds to a viral protein, usually a small piece of a protein found on the virus’s outer membrane. As such, those who get vaccinated with an mRNA vaccine are not exposed to the virus nor can they become infected with the virus by the vaccine.
The AZ vaccine, however, used a viral vector to deliver genetic material (DNA) to code for the specific protein of concern. It contained a modified, replication-deficient chimpanzee adenovirus ChAdOx1 and coding sequence of SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
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