AstraZeneca’s corona vaccine suffered from an increasing image problem, and the company is now discontinuing it

What kind of vaccine is AstraZeneca again?

The vaccine has been popularly called AstraZeneca, but that is the name of the manufacturer, the drug itself is called Vaxzevria. According to the RIVM, 2.8 million vaccines have been administered in the Netherlands.

The government wanted to vaccinate as many people as possible in a short time in the spring of 2021 because the coronavirus hit hard. The hospitals could no longer cope with the influx of Covid patients and several lockdowns were announced – paralyzing social life – with the aim of curbing the spread of the virus.

There were already plenty of vaccinations in England with AstraZeneca, vaccinations were still scarce and there was criticism of the slowness with which the Netherlands started vaccinating. Hugo de Jonge, who was healthcare minister at the time, had the credo: ‘Take what you can afford.’

In April 2021, De Jonge temporarily stopped vaccination due to reports about this vaccine at the Lareb side effects center. A woman died after a vaccination. She suffered from a combination of thrombosis and a reduced platelet count (TTS). A blood clot reached the lungs and the woman eventually died of a pulmonary embolism. A connection with the vaccine was still being investigated, but it is now clear that the vaccine can lead to this serious condition in very rare cases.

There were also supply problems with the vaccine, which also did not help the image. The Netherlands stopped offering AstraZeneca completely in October 2021. At the end of April this year, the British pharmaceutical company admitted for the first time that the vaccine can sometimes cause TTS.

Should the millions of Dutch people who have been vaccinated with AstraZeneca be concerned?

Epidemiology professor Frits Rosendaal from the LUMC also had himself vaccinated with AstraZeneca at that early stage and he is not worried at all. The serious side effect TTS, which affects 1 in 50,000 people, manifests itself on average after four or five days, for some it took weeks.

According to Rosendaal, a later revelation of this disease is not even biologically possible. “The vaccine ensures that you produce antibodies. But in rare cases, after the vaccine, the body produced antibodies against a protein involved in blood clotting. This causes blood clotting to deteriorate and patients develop clots.” According to Rosendaal, that response may or may not occur within a few days or at most weeks.

Given what we know now, shouldn’t AstraZeneca have been provided?

Rosendaal still thinks it is a good and effective remedy, especially during the time when Covid was in its heyday. “It protected well against Covid. The whole of England has been vaccinated with AstraZeneca. That’s where most of these side effects were. The vaccinations have of course helped to stop the epidemic. It has done far more good than harm.”

Rosendaal understands that the pharmaceutical company is now pulling the plug. Many countries have stopped providing AstraZeneca and are opting for other corona vaccines in their vaccination programs. “If hardly anyone buys your vaccine anymore, it is not very useful from a business perspective to maintain the entire production pipeline.”

Huub Savelkoul, professor of immunology at Wageningen University, thinks that the image problem also plays a role. He does not think AstraZeneca is necessarily a ‘worse’ vaccine than the others. “With any vaccine, you will find someone somewhere who has an adverse reaction to it. Only, yes, what are those chances? The vaccine has been proven effective and safe and could therefore be used in millions of people. Many people want a zero risk, for example of side effects, but such a thing does not exist in real life.”

What other side effects are there?

Every vaccine has side effects. A major international study published in February this year identified Guillain-Barré syndrome (GBS) as the most common rare side effect, a condition in which your own body attacks healthy nerves.

The Lareb side effects center also received reports of other serious side effects about AstraZeneca, such as CVST. That is a rare form of stroke. Or capillary leak syndrome, where fluid leaks from the capillaries and can lead to low blood pressure, swelling of the arms and legs and thickening of the blood. The side effects center also received 480 reports of inflammation of the heart muscle or pericardium after a corona vaccination with the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine.

Lareb has also received twenty reports of TTS after a vaccination. Three people are almost certain to have died from this rare side effect after an AstraZeneca vaccination, director Agnes Kant said.

Lareb has received more than 230,000 reports from people who developed complaints after an injection, from common problems such as a painful arm after the injection to the very rare reports of TTS.

Based on the total number of reports, Kant cannot say whether AstraZeneca causes more side effects than the other vaccines, because the vaccine has been used in different numbers and for different target groups. “We did see in previous research, in which we asked vaccinated people about their side effects, that familiar complaints such as headache, fatigue and not feeling well were mentioned more often with AstraZeneca.”

About the author: Malika Sevil has worked for Het Parool for 25 years. She wrote a lot about healthcare, she also reported on the corona crisis. Since 2022 she has been writing about inequality of opportunity, poverty and the gap.