Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 12) — The Philippines will continue to include Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccines in its nationwide inoculation drive even as more European nations pause its use as blood clot reports are being investigated.
The Health Department and the Food and Drug Administration on Friday acknowledged that some countries temporarily halted including the vaccines made by the British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical, but they stressed that this was done as a precautionary measure while investigations find out if there is any link between the vaccination and the reported adverse events following immunization.
“At present, the DOH and FDA emphasize that there is no indication for the Philippines to stop rollout of AstraZeneca vaccines,” DOH and FDA said in a joint statement, adding the benefits of vaccination continue to outweigh the risk.
Denmark, Iceland, and Norway suspended the use of AstraZeneca on Thursday. Earlier this week, a number of EU nations paused the use of doses that came from a particular batch of AstraZeneca vaccine after a 49-year-old woman in Austria died of multiple thrombosis.
The European Union’s medicines regulator is investigating whether the shot could be linked to a number of reports of blood clots.
In the Philippines, AstraZeneca is the more popular vaccine choice for healthcare workers as they can only choose between this or CoronaVac vaccines made by Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac. Many of them opted to defer getting Sinovac to wait for the arrival of AstraZeneca vaccines.
The country has received 525,000 doses of AstraZeneca vaccines supplied by global initiative COVAX facility. World Health Organization country representative Dr. Rabindra Abeyasinghe also said the Philippines will receive 4.5 million additional doses of AstraZeneca vaccines by April or May.
