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As you may have heard, many European countries have suspended use of the AstraZeneca vaccine after . How serious is this? Mercer Island MD Dr. Gordon Cohen joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss.

“This AstraZeneca vaccine — which has not yet been approved in the United States but has been widely approved in Europe. They’ve actually administered it to 17 million people over there. But they’ve had now reports of 22 cases of patients who developed either what’s called deep vein thrombosis, which is blood clots forming usually in the legs or the pelvis, and/or pulmonary embolism, which means that the blood clot breaks off and goes to the blood vessel to the lungs,” he said.

That said, health issues of these types often occur in the general population anyway, and at a lower rate.

“This has generated a lot of concern and, as a result, some of the countries are actually saying, ‘Well, we’re putting a ban or halt on using the AstraZeneca vaccine now.’ The fact of the matter is that there are certain incidents of deep venous thrombosis and pulmonary embolism within society normally anyway, and, actually, in the vaccinated population it’s occurring at a lower rate than it would otherwise normally occur in the general population,” Dr. Cohen said.

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“Having said that, I think there’s this sort of temporal relationship between people getting the vaccine and then suddenly having this problem, and saying that the two are related.”

As ³ÉÈËXÕ¾ Radio’s Dave Ross suggested, while there have been small reports of deaths related to the other vaccines, they have been below the background rate of people dying naturally.

“That’s the thing, is people are going to have natural occurring events no matter what, and it just so happens that they had gotten the vaccine, but they’re not necessarily related,” Dr. Cohen responded.

What incidents like these have contributed to, however, is a hesitancy toward the vaccine. Dr. Cohen told of being in a barbershop recently, and everyone there talked about why they weren’t going to get the vaccine.

“I was in the barbershop, getting my beard trimmed, and I was wearing scrubs. They all know I’m a doctor, … and so they started asking me questions about the vaccine, and the interesting thing was, it was about 10 guys in there, including the barbers who work there, and I was the only one in there that had gotten a vaccine,” he said. “Now that’s not really surprising. However, none of them wanted to get the vaccine.”

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“They all had some reason why they weren’t going to get the vaccine,” he continued. “But the most common reason was that, ‘We don’t know what the vaccine is going to do, and we don’t know if it’s going to make us infertile, or we don’t know if it’s going to make our arm fall off, or who knows what’ — I mean, the whole list of ludicrous things, but the reality is that they were concerned about getting the vaccine.”

Putting supply issues aside, this is a major concern for Dr. Cohen as well.

“So I think when we talk about the supply of the vaccine, that’s great. We’re working on ramping up the amount of supply of vaccine that we have, but we still have to focus a lot on education and advocacy to get people out there to actually get the vaccine, because that’s ultimately what will get us out of at least the short term with this pandemic,” he said.

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