An analysis of British immunization and death records released this week for December 2020 to May 2022 is said to show that young women who received at least one dose of AstraZeneca’s Vaxzevria-dubbed Covid-19 vaccine may have been more likely to die of a heart problem in the 12 weeks after vaccination, compared with a control group.

Concerns about the shot’s safety at the time led some countries to stop offering it to younger women aged 12 to 29, as well as indirectly to the EU’s controversial decision to negotiate additional supplies of Pfizer/BioNTech’s Comirnaty vaccine. The Anglo-Swedish drugmaker’s supply constraints also played a role, however.

The UK government withdrew the use of Vaxzevria for young people under 30 in April 2021, citing the risk of rare but dangerous blood clots.  In retrospect, the data analysts said the young women immunized at the time might have been mostly at-risk healthcare workers or those who were medically vulnerable, so that the study’s results may not apply to the general population.

AstraZeneca had delivered more than than 3 billion doses of the vaccine worldwide as of November 2022. Vaxzevria is still approved for use in more than 170 countries, although demand for immunization is seen as shifting to the new bi-valent Covid shots tailored to the Omicron variant of the virus.

Due to disagreements with US health authorities over the transparency of its clinical data, AstraZeneca never applied to the US Food and Drug Administration for US approval of its Covid shot.

Author: Dede Williams, Freelance Journalist