Covishield under review

New Delhi: The Union government has decided to conduct a deeper review of post-vaccination side-effects from Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine. The news came after several EU countries had suspended rollout of AstraZeneca shot over blood clot fears.

However, no cases of blood clots have been reported so far in the country. India earlier granted emergency use approval to Covishield. Denmark, Norway and Iceland paused use of Oxford-AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine as a precaution after isolated reports of recipients developing blood clots.

The local version of Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine is known as Covishield.

Serum Institute of India, the world's largest vaccine manufacturer by volume, joined hands with AstraZeneca to produce 1 billion doses of its vaccine.

"We are looking at all the adverse events, particularly serious adverse events like deaths and hospitalisation. We will come back if we find anything of concern," N K Arora, a member of India's national task force on Covid-19 said. Arora said there was "no immediate issue of concern as number of adverse events (in India) is very, very low. We are relooking at (adverse events that were reported) to see if there was any issue of blood clotting."

"As of March 11, there were 59 or 60 deaths, and they were all coincidental," he said. "In fact, there is a real effort from our side that once complete investigation is done, to put its results in public domain, on the ministry of health website," Arora added.