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When It Rains, It Pours for AstraZeneca Vaccine

Not the type of news you want to keep seeing about your company.

AstraZeneca has had a few missteps in the past few weeks. It came out touting the efficacy of its vaccine for COVID-19 and then had to backtrack a few percentage points when the vaccine police called the company out on interpreting its data too optimistically. Before that, there was the blood clotting stories that hit the news and there was a pause in vaccinations in Europe.

More recently, there is this from Canada: “Suspend AstraZeneca use for people under 55, vaccine committee recommends.”

Basically they are saying that it provides protections for people older than age 55 without blood clotting risk. But wait just a minute for people 55 and younger. 

Then for Canada again, there is this news item:

“Ontario, Canada’s Premier Doug Ford on Tuesday told residents ‘don’t make plans for Easter,’ citing his extreme concern over increasing Covid-19 cases, particularly among younger people now in intensive care units. [the bold is my emphasis]

‘I won’t hesitate to lock things down if he have to. I did it before, I’ll do it again,’ Ford said. ‘I won’t hesitate to lock things down until we can protect the ICU capacities at the hospitals.’

“Ford said everything is on the table in terms of restrictions to curb the spread of Covid-19, adding that an announcement would be made over the next couple of days.

“He added that any decision about further restrictions will be made based on the advice of Dr. David Williams, Ontario’s chief medical officer of health.”

The link above was shared by Matt Morrison. 

 

Eric Holdeman is a contributing writer for Emergency Management magazine and is the former director of the King County, Wash., Office of Emergency Management.