Thread by @kakape

“Our position has not changed”, says @EMA_News head Emer Cooke about AZ vaccine. “According to the current scientific knowledge, there is no evidence that would support restricting the use of this vaccine in any population."

@EMA_News I asked about numbers for Europe:
62 cases of cerebral venous thromboses so far, says Cooke with 9,2 million people vaccinated with AZ.
"If we look at the age-adjusted exposure, we calculate a risk of one per 100,000 in the under 60s."

@EMA_News CVST is much more common in women in general and about 2/3 of AZ vaccinees in Europe were women, says Peter Arlett. "this is why it is at this stage, difficult to disentangle the fact that there has been a preponderance of reports of this very rare potential side effect in women"

@EMA_News “If we look in individuals under 60, then we do see more cases of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, than we would expect to see from the background”, says Arlett.

@EMA_News Arlett references Greifswald group’s work and HIT like mechanism: “These remain hypotheses. They are not proven. They were discussed in the expert group on Monday which is feeding into the PRAC review, which will conclude next week."

@EMA_News Emer Cooke just corrected herself:
62 cases are worldwide, 44 cases are in European Economic Area.
14 deaths but not all of them associated with CVST.

@EMA_News “For the AZ vaccine based on spontaneous reporting in the EEA it's 4.8 cases per million, for the Biontech vaccine, based on the same criteria it was 0.2 cases per million and for the Moderna vaccine, based on the same criteria, 0 cases per million”, says Cooke.

@EMA_News I was hoping to get more clarity from this press conference, but they got pretty confused themselves with some numbers here. And the 31 German cases are not all in the European total. It includes "a significant number of German cases but certainly not all of them”, says Cooke.