The update from the EMA comes as a number of countries moved to stop administering the vaccine over the last few days. Germany, Italy, France, Cyprus, Luxembourg and others have all stopped use of the vaccine until further information is available. The UK-manufactured Oxford/AstraZeneca jab has been administered to about 17million people in the EU and UK, with the overall total of people developing blood clots amounting to just 37.
Emer Cooke, EMA Executive Director, said: “We have pulled together an ad hoc meeting again today to help us evaluate these cases with all the surrounding information that the member states will have.
“The experts will then carry on their assessment and again will meet on Thursday to come to a conclusion on the full information that has been gathered and to advise us as to whether there are any further actions that need to be taken.
“We will inform the public of the outcome immediately after this meeting.
“Our experts are working tirelessly to carry out this assessment as quickly as possible, but it needs a scientific evaluation, we need to have the facts first, we cannot come to a conclusion until we have done a thorough scientific analysis and we owe it to the European citizens to deliver this clear and science-based response.”
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She said: “We know that many thousands of people develop thousands of clots annually for many different reasons.”