Italy bans AstraZeneca batch and Norway suspends jab's rollout

The decision to ban a particular batch of the AstraZeneca vaccine in Italy was made by the Italy Pharmaceutical Agency (AIFA), which reported that problems were found in a supply of 1 million doses that had been distributed across 17 countries in the EU.

The batch has already been shipped out to Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Estonia, France, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and Sweden.

Italian authorities said the safety committee of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is reviewing the cases reported in connection with that particular batch as well as all other cases of thromboembolic events or blood clotting-related conditions reported after vaccination.

8 European nations including Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Norway and Iceland have decided to stop using the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine due to serious blood clot incidents reported in many countries.

Iceland has become the latest European nation to suspend the AstraZeneca jab.

The tiny island nation has confirmed roughly 6,000 COVID cases since the start of the pandemic, which is roughly 2% of the population.

As per tweet of writer and skeptic Alex Berenson, this is not the only vaccine that causes adverse effects.

Alex Berenson tweeted "Just wait until they hear what the mRNA vaccines can do... Really, though, the side effect profile of the @astrazeneca vaccine is hardly worse than the mRNA shots, but somehow it has faced much more scrutiny. Follow the politics, I mean science."

Health minister of Denmark confirmed the suspension of AstraZeneca Jabs via tweet. He said "there's currently no ways to know for certain whether the cases of serious blood clots are connected to the vaccine, but the situation certainly warrants more investigation. We acted early, it needs to be thoroughly investigated."

Italian PM Mario Draghi halted a shipment of AstraZeneca jabs to Australia. Health authorities in Italy are suspending jabs from current batch of vaccine. On the other hand, health authorities in London and Brussels dismissed these issues, insisting that this vaccine is safe while going with plans to approve Johnson & Johnson's single-dose jab.

The EU medicines regulator said it was recommending the vaccine be authorized for all adults over 18 "after a thorough evaluation" of JNJ's data found the vaccine met the criteria for efficacy, safety and quality. The JNJ jab is the fourth to be licensed for use inside the EU.

Now Danish authorities also suspended AstraZeneca shot on Thursday. Many patients have reported cases of blood clots they received after getting vaccinated. This suspension will last for 2 weeks.

As per European medicines agency, there are no evidences that link blood clots with the vaccine. The company said only 22 cases of adverse events have been noticed and approx 3M people have been vaccinated.

One investor claimed Denmark's suspension of AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine on blood clot concerns shows "the detection systems that look for potential safety issues are working," and that most of these "safety events" would ultimately be linked to natural processes, not the jab.

"It's good to see the safety signal detection systems working and it's important that any safety signal is followed-up using the correct protocols," Shore analyst Adam Barker told Bloomberg. Data from the vaccine's phase three trials suggests that "you would expect that most safety signals won't ultimately be linked to the vaccine," he said.

However, "it's hard to make judgments on the impact on shareholder value," he added, given there are "a lot of moving parts." But ultimately, a risk-reward trade-off with any therapy; "you can only confidently make judgments on that decision when all the data is finalized and clear".

Recently, a 65-year-old man in India collapsed and passed away just five minutes after getting first dose of vaccine against covid-19. He was injected with 0.5 ml dose of Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine Covishield intramuscularly.

Even Australia's Health Minister Greg Hunt in charge of rolling out Australia's coronavirus vaccine program was hospitalized just one day after taking the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine.

According to a report by Germany's Standing Vaccination Commission, the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine is only effective 8% in people over 65.

Three European countries of Sweden, France and Germany have decided not to use AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine for people over 65. This decision was made due to the lack of data available about its effectiveness in elderly people.

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Russia blames Google outage on data centre fire

Russian authorities have blamed problems accessing Google and YouTube on a fire at a data centre in Strasbourg.

The country's media watchdog Roskomnadzor tweeted that the disruption was due to the incident.

The data centre belongs to French cloud service provider OVH, which runs 32 such sites in Europe, America and Asia.

No-one was injured in the fire, which was declared a major incident.

It is not clear how the blaze started.

Two other data centres on the site remain closed.

OVH provides cloud services for 1.6 million customers across 140 countries.

The multiplayer video game Rust was also impacted - its developers tweeted that some players' progression data had been permanently lost.

The Google outages come the same day as Roskomnadzor announced that it had deliberately slowed down the speed of Twitter for failing to remove 3,000 posts relating to suicide, drugs and pornography.

Twitter had failed to remove posts that are illegal in Russia - and pretty much everywhere else, actually:

'On Wednesday, Russia began throttling Twitter as a way of pressuring the San Francisco-based company to remove over 3,100 posts found to be in violation of Russian law. Specifically, this includes 450 instances of child pornography and more than 2,500 incitements to underage suicide.'

President Vladimir Putin recently gave the watchdog the power to block social media platforms if they discriminated against Russian media.

Twitter is the widely used by opposition figures including Alexei Navalny, who was jailed in January.

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Previously the authorities have experimented with ways to create a Russia-specific internet, separate from the rest of the world, something that it says would offer protection if the West cut off internet access - but which critics say would allow it to censor a range of content.

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RT in Germany is planning to take legal action against the tabloid Bild, after the Berlin newspaper ran a sensationalist tale that relied on leaked Telegram chats from a former employee, who claimed he had to spy for the channel.

In the article published on Tuesday, reporter Julian Roepcke, who has previously been aligned with the 'Disinformation Portal' of NATO's Atlantic Council adjunct, claims that, according to Bild's information, President Vladimir Putin ordered a spy op on his "public enemy number one." It allegedly targeted opposition figure Alexey Navalny and two of his close aides. The supposed snooping is said to have happened during the activist's treatment for alleged Novichok poisoning last year at Berlin's Charité clinic.

On top of that, writes Roepcke, "Russia's leadership used the Russian foreign broadcaster RT DE, which in turn relied on two German employees." To back up the claims, Bild also ran an interview with Daniel Lange, then an employee of RT DE, who claimed he had a feeling of having been used as a spy in the case. Lange also leaked to Bild what he says were internal chats with his bosses.

Calling out Roepcke's article, the head of RT in Germany Dinara Toktosunova said Lange had leaked Telegram chats in which he was merely being asked to do his job, after he'd failed to get any exclusive and newsworthy material about Navalny's stay in Germany.

"We remind our colleagues of the German legislation that (for now) protects the press by allowing it to collect information about matters of public interest," Toktosunova added.

The Bild article comes just days after Commerzbank told the parent company of RT DE and Ruptly that it would be ending their business relationship and closing their accounts at the end of May. Since Commerzbank changed its terms of service last November, RT DE had been trying to find an alternative bank, but 20 other financial institutions have either ignored its enquiries or flatly refused to open accounts on its behalf.

Leonid Volkov, a senior aide of the Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, has delivered an uncouth reaction to a baseless report by Berlin tabloid Bild alleging that RT's German service sent its employees to "spy" on his boss.

On Tuesday, Lithuania-based Volkov took the allegations published by red-top Bild at face value, launching a verbal attack on the head of RT in Germany (RT DE), Dinara Toktosunova, and Ruptly's chief content officer and executive adviser, Ekaterina Mavrenkova.

"It looks like [RT editor-in-chief Margarita] Simonyan's b****es are about to get into serious trouble," he wrote in his Telegram channel. Volkov, who describes himself as the "coordinator" of the "network of Alexey Navalny's regional offices" then enthusiastically suggested that RT was about to lose its journalistic license in Germany.