One of the few positives to have come out of the Covid-19 pandemic has been the remarkable speed at which vaccines have been developed and rolled out in months, rather than the many years that was the previous norm. Their effectiveness is being increasingly proved as more people are vaccinated, and they appear to be extremely well tolerated in terms of side effects.
In the UK at least, vaccine hesitancy does not appear to be as great a problem as was initially feared and no new potential side effects have been reported that were not already known about from the vaccine trial data.
It was therefore something of a surprise last week when European Union countries started to suspend the rollout of the AstraZeneca vaccine, citing concerns about it being linked to reports of blood clots in people who received the vaccine.
Denmark, Iceland and Norway were first out of the blocks, closely followed by Italy and Austria and a number of other EU countries.
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