Sweden became the latest European nation to suspend use of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine on Tuesday, following in the footsteps of a dozen other countries who have stopped using the vaccine in the past week citing concerns over potentially fatal blood clotting. Experts say these decisions are eroding confidence in vaccines just as the world is racing to keep up with a mutating virus which has already killed more than 2.6 million people globally. Denmark was the first country to announce a suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine last week in order to investigate reports of blood clots, followed by Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, among others. AstraZeneca said a review of the safety data of the more than 17 million people in the E. U. and U. K. who have received the vaccine, showed  “no evidence of an increased risk” of blood clots.“The stakes with AstraZeneca are particularly high, because this was anticipated to be a vaccine that much of the world will ultimately come to depend on for their vaccination efforts,” says Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. The suspensions, which are at odds with guidance from the European Medicines Agency and the World Health Organization, seem to be motivated more by politics than science. Both agencies announced on Tuesday that they are conducting additional reviews of the vaccine, just days after they both declared the shot safe. The U. S. has not yet approved the AstraZeneca vaccine, but is expected to in the coming months. The consequences of slowing down or undermining ongoing vaccination programs have global implications, experts say. People will continue to get sick and die: global herd immunity is only as strong as the country with the weakest vaccination uptake. And certain countries, like Italy, are already heading back into lockdown over new coronavirus variants."Even if the vaccine ends up being safe and this is a problem that's solved. You have to rebuild public trust, which can be extremely challenging,” says Isaac Bogoch, an infectious disease specialist and associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto. Vaccine hesitancy is particularly worrisome right now, as more contagious and deadly viruses circle the European continent. The B.1.1.7 variant of Covid-19, which was first identified in the U. K., quickly became the dominant strain in that country and has now been detected in more than 30 other countries.“Public health actors in Europe face a very delicate balancing act because trust in vaccines is so fragile,” Jonathan Kennedy, an associate professor in global public health at Queen Mary University of London, wrote in an email. Europeans had concerns about vaccines even before Covid. In a 2019 Eurobarometer poll, nearly half of Europeans indicated that they believe (incorrectly) that vaccines cause serious side effects.


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