AstraZeneca withdraws its COVID-19 vaccine from the European market

LONDON – Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has requested that European authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine be withdrawn, according to the EU medicines regulator.

In an update on the European Medicines Agency’s website on Wednesday, the regulator said approval for AstraZeneca’s Vaxzevria was withdrawn “at the request of the marketing authorization holder”.

AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine first received EMA approval in January 2021. Within weeks, however, concerns grew about the vaccine’s safety as dozens of countries suspended use of the vaccine after unusual blood clots, but rare, they have been detected in a small number of immunized people. The EU regulator concluded that the AstraZeneca shot did not increase the overall risk of clots, but questions remained.

Partial results from its first large trial — which Britain used to authorize the vaccine — were clouded by a manufacturing error that researchers did not immediately acknowledge. Insufficient data on how well the vaccine protected the elderly led some countries to initially restrict its use to younger populations before reversing course.

Billions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were distributed to the poorest countries through a program coordinated by the UN, as it is cheaper and easier to produce and distribute. But later studies suggested that the more expensive messenger RNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna provided better protection against COVID-19 and its many variants, and most countries switched to those vaccines.

The UK’s 2021 national coronavirus immunization program has relied heavily on the AstraZeneca vaccine, which was largely developed by scientists at the University of Oxford with significant financial support from the government. But even Britain later resorted to purchasing mRNA vaccines for its COVID booster vaccination programs and the AstraZeneca vaccine is now rarely used globally.

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