About 17 million people in the United Kingdom and other European countries have received the AstraZeneca vaccine for coronavirus. Out of these 17 million people, only about 35 people had serious complications after the shot, though it is said that it has nothing to do with the shot, they probably had some underlying conditions.
“Just because something happens after vaccination doesn’t mean that it’s caused by vaccination,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security and an infectious disease expert. “There are always going to be things that crop up because there is a group of people that had something that was naturally going to happen anyway,” said Monica Gandhi, an infectious diseases specialist and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
The one big change that we can see in the European countries is the number of people getting hospitalized. Vaccination has decreased the number of people getting sick and hence decreased the number of people getting hospitalized. Both Gandhi and Adalja claim AstraZeneca to be safe and effective. “This is a safe and efficacious vaccine and it’s the main driver of the control the United Kingdom is having right now,” Adalja said. “We are seeing astounding results,” Gandhi said. “The real-world data for the AstraZeneca vaccine is very exciting.”
