The statement comes after Bulgaria, Romania and Thailand joined three Scandinavian countries in suspending inoculations with this particular vaccine.

They were reacting to reports of blood clots in some people who had received the shot, Although there is no evidence of any link, the European Medicines Agency has also backed the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, saying the benefits do outweigh the possible risks.

What I've been talking about this to Professor Paul Hunter from the University of East Anglia School of Medicine and asked him what the data shows us about potential harmful side effects from this vaccine in in England and the United Kingdom, we have what's called a yellow card scheme so that whenever you give a drug or or or a vaccine to somebody and they develop an adverse event in the time after that, you generally if you don't know it's for certain that it's not related to the vaccine or the drug, you then fill out a yellow card and these are collated and I've looked at the most recent analyses of both the fighter and the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccines, and both of them have reported the presence of, uh, pulmonary thrombosis embolism, which is sort of blood clots on the lung.

Uh, at about 12 to 15 reports so far.

And that's actually a lot less than you'd expect from normal.

Uh, incidents of the disease in the population is being vaccinated.

So I think we can say that, yes, blood clots are happening after vaccination, but they're almost certainly not caused by the vaccinations.

Just very briefly, I want to pick up on what you said.

Is it the case that there's just as much risk or lack of risk with, say, Pfizer as there is with AstraZeneca?

Well, the data from the yellow card schemes which I looked at this morning, uh, gives I think the figures was about 15 Trumbo embolisms for Pfizer and 12 for Oxford AstraZeneca, which, as I said, is a lot lower than you would expect from the large number of vaccines that have been given in the UK so far.

So I think we can be pretty sure that neither visor nor us Oxford AstraZeneca actually increased the risk of anybody getting from the embolism.