Pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca has formally requested the European Medicines Agency to revoke its authorization for the COVID-19 vaccine.
According to an update on the European Medicines Agency’s website on Wednesday, the regulator stated that the approval for AstraZeneca’s Vaxzevria had been withdrawn “at the request of the marketing authorization holder.”
Initially approved in January 2021, the AstraZeneca vaccine encountered safety concerns regarding rare blood clots, prompting several countries to temporarily suspend its usage.
Although the European Union regulator concluded that the overall risk was low, doubts persisted. Furthermore, initial limitations were imposed due to limited data on its efficacy in older adults.
Billions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were distributed to lower-income countries through a U.N.-coordinated program, as it was more cost-effective and simpler to produce and distribute. However, subsequent studies indicated that the mRNA vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna offered superior protection against COVID-19 and its variants, leading most countries to transition to these vaccines.
In 2021, the U.K.’s national coronavirus immunization program heavily relied on the AstraZeneca vaccine, predominantly developed by scientists at Oxford University with substantial government funding. However, even the United Kingdom later opted to procure mRNA vaccines for its COVID booster vaccination campaigns, and the AstraZeneca vaccine is now seldom used worldwide.
