MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 16th March, 2021) Guinea-Bissau has postponed the start of its COVID-19 immunization campaign with the AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine until May due to safety concerns, Magda Robalo, the high commissioner for the fight against COVID-19 in the West African nation, said.
In recent days, a number of countries across the world have temporarily halted the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine following reports about several cases of post-inoculation side effects such as thrombosis. Guinea-Bissau is the second African country to postpone inoculation after the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
"We have decided, as a safety and precautionary measure to postpone the vaccination campaign [until May] until we have the assurance of the safety of the doses of the vaccine to be administered," Robalo told reporters on Monday, as cited by the Xinhua news agency.
The West African country is set to receive 144,000 doses of the coronavirus vaccine through the international COVAX mechanism.
AstraZeneca, commenting on reports of increased occurrences of blood clots linked to its vaccine, has said that it had found no evidence of risk after conducting a review of safety data of over 17 million inoculated people across the European Union and the United Kingdom.
