Staff Reporter
PHARMACEUTICAL company AstraZeneca has admitted for the first time that its Covid-19 vaccine can cause rare side effects such as thrombosis.
The admission came in court documents that were submitted in February to the High Court in the United Kingdom as part of a class-action lawsuit.
As reported by British daily The Telegraph, AstraZeneca accepted that its Covid vaccine ‘can, in very rare cases, cause TTS’, which stands for Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome. This causes people to have blood clots as well as a low blood platelet count.
If it loses the legal action, the company is facing paying out damages of up to £100 million to victims and relatives, with a total of 51 cases lodged at the High Court.
The first of these cases was filed by Jamie Scott, a father of two who was left with a permanent brain injury after he was given the vaccine in April 2021.
He later developed a blood clot and a bleed on the brain that has since stopped him from working, The Telegraph reported.
His wife was called three times by the hospital to inform her that her husband was going to die.
The Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which was developed in the UK by Oxford University and British-Swedish company AstraZeneca, was used in Spain until the alarm was raised about a series of thrombosis cases in other European Union countries.
Its use was then reactivated but directed solely at priority groups such as police officers, civil guards and teachers, among others.
Lawyers in the High Court case in the UK are arguing that the vaccine is ‘defective’ and that its efficacy was ‘vastly overstated’.
AstraZeneca is strenuously denying all of these claims.
