Let’s get this in perspective. The AstraZeneca (AZ) Covid vaccine is being withdrawn worldwide after the pharmaceutical company admitted in a British court that it can, in rare cases, cause fatal blood clots.
More than 50 families are currently taking legal steps for compensation, claiming the jab was ‘defective’ and caused long-term injury or death to their loved ones.
Sadly, given that the Covid vaccine campaign was by far the biggest in world history — and that it had to be done at unprecedented speed — such isolated tragedies were, I’m afraid, inevitable.
The question is whether, on a population-wide basis, the benefit of the vaccines outweighed the risks — and on that score, the evidence is overwhelming.
Yes, the Government’s medical advisers were overly optimistic when they speculated during the pandemic that, if the whole population could be vaccinated, our collective immunity could be raised to the point that the virus itself was eradicated. This has never happened, as ongoing Covid waves still prove.
More than 50 families are currently taking legal steps for compensation, claiming the jab was ‘defective’ and caused long-term injury or death to their loved ones
But we must never lose sight of the full picture. More than three billion AZ doses were given worldwide, and an estimated 6.5 million lives were saved.
And in all probability, I am one of them.
In November last year, aged 85, I caught the virus for the first time and spent five days in hospital, weak, exhausted and constantly breathless.
F or two days, I was on oxygen. The part of my brain that has been obsessed with medicine all my life found this experience rather interesting. I’m not sure that my family viewed it in quite the same light.
I owe my survival, I believe, to the fact that I had the AZ vaccine early in 2021, followed by three boosters. In my case, some of the batches came from Pfizer as well as AZ, but all the data shows they were approximately equal when it came to reducing the severity of the disease.
Multiply my own case by many millions and it’s obvious that mass vaccination not only enabled legions of patients aged 60 and over to withstand the worst of the disease — it also kept our hospitals from being overwhelmed and collapsing into chaos.
Conspiracy theorists have seized on AZ’s recent court admission, claiming it proves the drug companies pushed dangerous and ineffective vaccines on the world.
But in the event, only a few people — comparatively speaking — were so unlucky as to suffer from blood clots or other serious complications.
Why these clots occurred in a very small number of people, we do not yet know, but no one could have predicted them.
And so I’m sorry to disappoint the conspiracy theorists, but there was nothing opportunistic about these jabs or the way they were produced.
It is worth recapping here how the AZ vaccine worked. The Oxford University scientists behind it produced a genetically engineered form of Covid-19, which could not cause illness — but which did help patients to produce their own protective immune response.
One theory is that the damage suffered by some people was caused by a specific component of the vaccine: an adenovirus, which was used as a sort of ‘carrier’ to kickstart an immune reaction in the patient. The danger was missed in trials, however, because this adverse reaction was so exceptionally rare.
For the people affected, it is a tragedy — but it is no reason to dismiss the vaccines out of hand.
Why, today, do so many people remain doubtful about the Covid jabs — and unwilling to see them as the modern miracle they really are?
In part, this is down to the mood of terror as the pandemic first took hold.
As pictures hit the news of Italian intensive care units in crisis at the beginning of March 2020, panic spread even faster than Covid itself. Conflicting opinions on the best course of action became dizzying and deafening: some urged draconian lockdowns, others pleaded for the use of face masks and hand-washing, still others insisted the risks were being exaggerated.
Professor Hugh Pennington: I owe my survival, I believe, to the fact that I had the AZ vaccine early in 2021, followed by three boosters
The country became a hotbed for competing conspiracy theories, fuelled by social media — some of which were malicious and generated by troll farms in hostile nations.
(Such lurid claims continue even now, of course, with anti-vaxxers blaming every medical condition, from the collapse of footballers on the pitch to the Princess of Wales’s cancer diagnosis, on the vaccine.)
Cast your mind back to those dark and confused days, and remember how loud were the calls from politicians and NHS staff for any means of preventing the spread of Covid, since a cure seemed out of reach — as it still does.
Yet here’s the thing. Even though the AZ vaccine was hailed as an innovation when it was first approved for use in the UK at the end of December 2020, it was actually the culmination of many years’ work.
Much of the technology was, in fact, waiting to be used when Covid-19 first emerged in 2020. The AZ team even had a ‘candidate’ vaccine ready by February that year — before the British government had given serious consideration to the need for any lockdown.
S o those who claim the drug companies hurried out experimental, untested, recklessly dangerous vaccines are seriously wide of the mark.
Finally, on December 8, 2020, what then prime minister Boris Johnson memorably described as the ‘scientific cavalry coming over the brow of the hill’ arrived.
Yet there were widespread misunderstandings about how the new jabs would work. Most lay people seemed to expect the Covid vaccine to form an impenetrable ‘barrier’ against disease. That’s how we tend to view jabs against everything from TB to measles, polio to smallpox.
The reality, in the case of the Covid vaccines, is different. They are more of a superpower, making our bodies stronger and better able to fight off an enemy . . . like Popeye when he eats spinach.
And like Popeye, we don’t stay superhuman for ever. The power wears off and needs to be renewed from time to time. Yet even if they weren’t a magic shield, the vaccines proved to be essential.
Though they had limited success in stopping the virus from multiplying in the mouth, nose and throat, they were highly effective at minimising the risk of serious Covid infection in the rest of the body, such as the lungs and vital organs. This saved countless lives.
What they also did less well, as we eventually found out, was stopping the spread of the disease through the air from our mouths and noses. Of course, none of this was clear amid the panic of the pandemic — and even today, we find ourselves searching for answers. The debate continues about how much good and how much harm was done by lockdown, for example.
So yes, many questions remain. It is now clear that, for a tiny minority of people, the decision to be jabbed proved disastrous.
But we should remember that bigger picture, too. Without the jabs, Britain’s older population would have been decimated.
Even with the introduction of the vaccines, Britain lost up to 230,000 people to the virus. Without the jabs, many thousands more would have died.
And I am probably one of them.
■ Hugh Pennington is an emeritus professor of bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen.
PAT HAGAN: Was it rushed out? How many died from it in the UK? And could you still suffer from side-effects?
The jab was the first in a series of vaccinations to offer a glimmer of hope that we might be able to tackle the virus
The AstraZeneca jab is said to have saved more than 6.5million lives globally in the first year of use alone.
But yesterday, the manufacturer revealed it’s pulling the plug on its game-changing Covid-19 vaccine, after 50million doses were given in the UK.
Unveiled in January 2021, ten months after the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a global emergency, the jab was the first in a series of vaccinations to offer a glimmer of hope that we might be able to tackle the virus.
It was hailed as one of the great scientific achievements of the modern era, slashing the time it normally takes to get a new vaccine on the market from almost a decade to just months.
And in February 2022, Professor Sarah Gilbert, a vaccine specialist at Oxford University and one of the pioneers behind the AstraZeneca (AZ) jab, was made a Dame in recognition of this work.
But the vaccine remains controversial.
The manufacturer is being sued by more than 50 alleged victims and grieving relatives in a multi-million-pound High Court action.
In one case it’s claimed a 35-year-old mother-of-two, Alpa Tailor, died from adverse side-effects after the jab; another claimant, Jamie Scott, a father-of-two, says he’s been left with a permanent brain injury.
So what’s the truth about the jab and why is it being scrapped?
Why are they pulling the plug on the vaccine?
It’s no longer any use. In an official announcement earlier this week, Cambridge-based AstraZeneca said it was shutting down production due to a ‘surplus of available updated vaccines’ which target new variants of the virus.
Basically, that means the virus has evolved so much from its early strains that the AZ jab is much less effective than the dozens of more up-to-date ones developed by other drug companies.
‘The vaccine has had its time,’ says Peter Openshaw, professor of experimental medicine at Imperial College London. ‘But it was really fundamental in terms of pushing forward the vaccine agenda. There’s no doubt at all that it saved millions of lives.’
Is the real reason the jab’s side-effects?
It is true to say that, fairly early on in the pandemic, several countries suspended the use of the AZ vaccine after reports that some patients had subsequently developed life-threatening blood clots — particularly in the brain.
These countries included Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Austria and Italy. Germany banned it in the under-60s.
And in April 2021, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) admitted there was a ‘possible’ link between the jab and rare blood clots, known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, which raises the risk of a stroke.
A later analysis at Oxford University suggested that for every 10 million people given the jab, roughly 66 would get a clot in their veins.
In contrast, Covid caused an average of 12,614 clots in veins. Even taking the contraceptive pill was a bigger risk than the jab.
Shortly afterwards, it was announced that those under 30 in the UK would be offered alternative jabs.
Last month, AstraZeneca admitted for the first time that the jab could cause clotting problems ‘in very rare cases’.
Professor Adam Finn, an infectious disease specialist at Bristol University, told the Today programme on Radio 4: ‘It’s very clear that this vaccine was associated with clotting — that’s been clear for a long time but only recently acknowledged [by AstraZeneca].’
But he insisted this rare side-effect was not relevant to the withdrawal of the AZ vaccine.
Are side-effects proof the vaccine was ‘rushed’ out?
One of the breathtaking features of the AZ vaccine story was the pace at which it was developed.
‘The speed with which it was developed was phenomenal,’ says Professor Openshaw.
This aroused concerns among some sections of the public that the vaccine had been rushed and lacked appropriate safety checks. But experts are adamant no corners were cut.
Furthermore, very rare side-effects, such as the vaccine-related clots, won’t always show up in drug trials where only a few hundred, or a few thousand people, are involved.
They often only come to light when millions more people are given them.
Professor Openshaw says: ‘We have to be honest and say everything we take in terms of medicine carries a risk, however small, but this has to be balanced against the enormous good they can do.’
Was the jab as effective as we were led to believe?
Clinical trials suggested the AZ vaccine was roughly 72 per cent effective at preventing symptomatic Covid-19 infections when patients were given two doses spaced four to 12 weeks apart.
But the UK switched to using mRNA vaccines, made by Pfizer and Moderna, as these were found to be more effective (the Pfizer vaccine was 97 per cent effective against symptomatic Covid).
How many people in the UK died from the AZ jab?
Figures from the MHRA show 81 deaths in the UK are possibly linked with adverse blood-clotting reactions to the AZ vaccine. That doesn’t mean the jab has been confirmed as the cause of death.
If the jab was safe, why is AstraZeneca being sued?
The 51 victims and relatives of alleged victims are claiming damages worth up £100million.
They argue that the risk of life-threatening clots means the vaccine was not as safe as individuals were entitled to expect.
They also believe the Government vaccine damage scheme is flawed. It only makes a payout if it can be proved someone died from the vaccine or was left ‘severely disabled’.
Could I suffer side-effects from the jab I had in 2020?
Professor Finn says: ‘Anyone who has received the vaccine in the past without any problems is not at risk of any side-effects now.’