Jan Hamáček, Minister of the Interior for the Czech Republic, has instructed the Czech ambassador in Denmark to inquire with Danish officials about purchasing AstraZeneca vaccines that the Western European country has now written off as dangerous.
“Denmark has announced that it’s suspending the use of AstraZeneca vaccinations. I have instructed the Czech Ambassador in Copenhagen to contact the Danish authorities immediately and express the Czech Republic’s interest in purchasing all AstraZeneca vaccines from Denmark,” Hamáček said on Twitter.
Danish officials recently announced they would be withdrawing all 2.4 million doses of the vaccine until further notice. The Danish Health Authority (DAN) said that their studies had shown a higher than normal occurrence of negative effects like blood clots and thrombosis, allegedly affecting about one in every 40,000 recipients.
Danish authorities have linked at least two cases of thrombosis to the vaccinations, one of them fatal for a 60-year old woman. Soren Brostrom, Director General of the DAN said that although it was a “difficult decision,” the country had other vaccines to choose from.
“The upcoming target groups for vaccination are less likely to become severely ill from Covid-19,” he said. “We must weigh this against the fact that we now have a known risk of severe adverse effects from vaccination with AstraZeneca, even if the risk in absolute terms is slight.”
At the time of writing, the Czech Republic has approximately 13.5% of the population vaccinated against COVID-19 as the number of confirmed cases has drastically dropped.
