AstraZeneca withdraws its vaccine in the face of “decline in demand”

Despite an increase in its profit, the pharmaceutical laboratory has been reporting for months a constant decline in sales of drugs linked to Covid-19.

The British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca announced on Wednesday May 8 that it was withdrawing from sale its Covid-19 vaccine Vaxzevria, one of the first put on the market during the pandemic. The group reports, in a press release, a “vaccine surplus updated” faced with the different variants of the virus, and a “decline in demand for Vaxzevria, which is no longer manufactured or distributed.”

The European medicines authority, the EMA, wrote on its website on Tuesday that the authorization for the sale of Vaxzevria had been withdrawn “at the request of the marketing authorization holder”namely the pharmaceutical laboratory.

In a press release, AstraZeneca said it wanted “conclude this chapter” and welcomes that more than “6.5 million lives [aient] were saved during the first year of use alone” vaccine, “and more than three billion doses [aient] distributed throughout the world.

Rare cases of thrombosis

If AstraZeneca’s profit jumped 21% year-on-year in the first quarter, driven particularly by oncology, the group has been reporting for months a constant decline in sales of drugs linked to covid. Its vaccine against Covid-19 had suffered several setbacks, including a green light for marketing which never arrived in the United States. It also experienced delivery problems in Europe, combined with suspicions of increased risks of thrombosis following several deaths.

AstraZeneca says it updated information on Vaxzevria in April 2021, with the agreement of the British regulator MHRA, to include the possibility that it could trigger thrombosis in rare cases. The United Kingdom, which first relied on Vaxzevria at the start of its anti-Covid vaccination campaign, then replaced it with competing products.

The group regularly recalls that regulators and various states which have authorized the vaccine have estimated that “the benefits of vaccination far outweigh the risks of extremely rare side effects.”