The New York Times reports:

After days of touting the safety of AstraZeneca’s vaccine, Italy’s health minister, Roberto Speranza, took a call from his German counterpart on Monday and learned that Germany was concerned enough about a few cases of serious blood clots among some who had received the vaccine to suspend its use.

For Italy and its neighbors, that call could not have come at a worse time.

Their vaccine rollouts were already lagging because of shortages, and they were encouraging people to get those shots that were available. Only days earlier, Prime Minister Mario Draghi reassured Italians who had become wary of the AstraZeneca vaccine. “There is no clear evidence, clear correlation, that these events are linked to the administration of the vaccine,” he said.

But once Germany hit pause, the pressure mounted on other governments to do the same, lest public opinion punish them if they seemed incautious by comparison, and for the sake of a united European front.

German’s decision set off a domino effect of defections from the vaccine. A cascade of countries — Italy, France and Spain — soon joined the decision to suspend AstraZeneca, dealing a significant blow to Europe’s already shaky inoculation drive despite a lack of clear evidence that the vaccine had caused any harm.

On Tuesday, the European Union’s top drug regulator pushed back against concerns about the shot, saying that there was no sign of its causing dangerous problems and that its lifesaving benefits “outweigh the risk of the side effects.” The European Medicines Agency was still studying the issue, said Emer Cooke, its executive director, adding that there was “no indication that vaccination has caused these conditions.”

It appears increasingly clear that the suspensions have as much to do with political considerations as scientific ones.

“There is an emotional situation that is the fallout from this case that started in Germany,” Giorgio Palù, the president of Italy’s Medicines Agency said on Tuesday. He said: “There is no danger. There is no correlation at the epidemiological level.”

The agency’s director was more explicit.

“It was a political choice,” Nicola Magrini, the director, told La Repubblica newspaper on Monday, saying that Italy suspended the administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine because other European countries had decided to do so.

By Tuesday, some governments were already recasting their decisions as a step to buck up confidence in vaccinations — a regrouping, of sorts, of a troubled effort. But for now, the suspensions seem certain to have had the opposite effect, further delaying Europe’s stumbling rollout and perhaps putting at risk hundreds or thousands more lives. [Continue reading…]