Spain probes death of teacher after AstraZeneca jab

OVIEDO, Spain

Spain’s Health Ministry said on Wednesday that it was now looking into three serious blood clotting incidents, including one death, that may be tied to the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Spain temporarily paused administering the vaccine on Monday as more reports of a specific type of thrombosis emerged.

Over the weekend, Spanish officials had detected one case of thrombosis after the vaccine, which was characterized by low blood platelets – a pattern that European officials are suspecting could be a rare side effect.

On Wednesday, the Ministry said two more similar cases came to light in Spain, one of which ended in the death of a teacher on Tuesday.

Local media have identified the teacher as a 43-year-old mother of two with no known pre-existing health conditions.

She had been vaccinated in early March and soon after went to the doctors complaining of a bad headache, but doctors said it was a typical side effect of the vaccine and sent her home.

Days later, she returned to the hospital, where doctors discovered a severe cerebral hemorrhage that led to her death, local media say.

Spain’s health officials insisted that they are studying three isolated cases “in the context of 975,661 people vaccinated in Spain” with AstraZeneca.

At the same time, there is no guarantee that the events are directly linked to the vaccine and not just coincidental.

“Although these events are rare, they can occur in the general population,” the Ministry said in the statement.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the World Health Organization (WHO) remain convinced that the benefits of AstraZeneca’s vaccine outweigh the potential risks.

Spanish officials said they hope the temporary pause would help determine if there is any causation between the vaccine and these rare blood clots. If there is, they would like to know if there are any particular risk factors for the blood clots so people at risk can receive different vaccines.

Meanwhile, Spain reported another 228 COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday, bringing the country’s official death toll to nearly 73,000.

Infections in Spain remain low, but appear to have plateaued. The health ministry confirmed another 6,092 infections on Wednesday.