BERLIN authorities have told all hospitals and clinics to suspend the use of AstraZeneca whilst the country reassesses the vaccine, in the latest blow to the Oxford jab suppliers coming from Europe.

Berlin's state hospital groups Charite and Vivantes have stopped giving women under the age of 60 shots of AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine, German daily Tagesspiegel reported on its website, citing a spokeswoman for the hospitals. The newspaper said the state of Berlin had announced it would pause AstraZeneca vaccinations for everyone under 60, not just women.

Some 19,000 people work at the Charite hospitals and 17,000 at Vivantes, which operates clinics as well as care homes.

Tagesspiegel said that around two thirds of staff at Charite have been vaccinated so far, and 70 percent of those workers have received one shot of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

Since the majority of the people working in the clinics are women, numerous vaccinations are likely to be cancelled for the time being.

A total of 19,000 employees work at the Charité. And 17,000 work for the Vivantes Group, which also operates nursing homes in addition to clinics.

From the beginning of the year at the Charité and in the Vivantes clinics, nurses and doctors in Covid-19 wards were first vaccinated with the Biontech agent.


In the past few weeks, the staff on other wards, and most recently also those not working directly with patients, were vaccinated with AstraZeneca. In the coming weeks, students and individual patients at the Charité should have also been provided with Astrazeneca on request.

It is unclear whether those who have previously received the first dose of AstraZeneca will also receive the second dose of this preparation.

Other hospitals in the region are now also discussing who the British-Swedish manufacturer's vaccine will be used for.

The stocks of the vaccines from Biontech and Moderna are significantly lower.

It was only on Monday that the Euskirchen district in North Rhine-Westphalia reported that corona vaccinations with AstraZeneca would be stopped for women under 55 years of age.

Two cases of thrombosis are to be examined there: A 47-year-old woman died after the vaccination.

The patient had developed a sinus vein thrombosis in the brain a few days after the vaccination.

Another resident also developed a thrombosis after being vaccinated and is currently being treated.

Germany's vaccine regulator said on Tuesday it has recorded 31 cases of a rare blood clot in the brain, nine of which resulted in deaths, after people received a COVID-19 vaccine from AstraZeneca.

The Paul Ehrlich Institute (PEI) said it has now registered 31 cases of clots in the cerebral veins - known as sinus vein thrombosis, or CSVT - and that in 19 of these there was a deficiency of blood platelets or thrombocytepenia.

In nine cases, the affected people died. With the exception of two cases, all reports concerned women between the ages of 20 and 63. The two men were 36 and 57 years old.

AstraZeneca's vaccine is much less popular in Berlin than the Senate had hoped for.

Hundreds of thousands who have access to a vaccination code [which is required to book a vaccination] apparently do not use this authorisation to get a vaccination appointment.

The heads of five of the six university clinics in North Rhine-Westphalia are also in favour of a temporary stop of vaccinations of younger women with the active ingredient from AstraZeneca.

The risk of further deaths was too high, they said in a joint letter to the federal and state health ministers, which is available to the German press agency.

The news from Berlin comes after Canadian health officials also said they would stop offering AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine to people aged under 55 and require a new analysis of the shot's benefits and risks based on age and gender.

Canada's deputy chief public health officer Howard Njoo said at a media briefing: "We are pausing the use of AstraZeneca vaccine to adults under 55 years of age pending further risk benefit analysis."