Vaccine Rollout Paused After Dangerous Complications Occur

The world is standing on the precipice of a grand reopening, after over a year of pseudo-solitude and quasi-quarantine spurred on by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

Tackling the illness has been a feat of human perseverance, as communities came together by staying apart.  Citizens socially distanced themselves, masked up, and found ingenious ways to support struggling businesses during the crisis, while medical experts worked to create treatments and vaccines that could soon relieve us of this horrid health burden.

Several pharmaceutical companies have quickly introduced vaccines that promised to put an end to the pandemic once and for all, but the speed at which they were introduced has some people concerned about their safety.

In Europe, those concerns have begun to hit home.

Denmark became at least the sixth European country to scale back the use of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine after some people who received it developed blood clots.

Health officials say they’re investigating the cases, but there’s no evidence so far that the British drugmaker’s jab caused the clots.

And these weren’t simple cases of trouble, either.

The Danish Health and Medicines Authority halted the rollout of AstraZeneca’s jab for at least two weeks on Thursday following “severe cases” of blood clots in vaccinated people, one of which was related to a death.

Danish officials say they need to take time to probe those incidents even though there’s good evidence the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe and effective.

There’s no telling what the news could do for vaccine confidence here in the US, which was already a concern for many health and wellness experts.