There is a greater risk of developing a blood clot from the contraceptive pill than the Oxford vaccine, expert says
A vaccine expert appeared on ITV's Good Morning Britain this morning to put the risks of the 'rare' blood clots from the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine into context.
Professor Adam Finn, from the University of Bristol, said that women are at 'far greater risk' of developing blood clots from the widely prescribed contraceptive pill than the Oxford jab.
This comes after 30 people out of the 18.1 million people who have received the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine have developed a blood clot, according to the MHRA. This has prompted government advisors to offer Brits under the age of 30 an alternative vaccine to the Oxford jab.
Finn, who is a member of the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI), said: "The contraceptive pill is a medicine that women take not because they are ill but as a choice in terms of how they are living their lives.
"The risks of thrombosis that come with taking the pill are very much higher than the risks that we were just seeing on those slides.
"Every year," he continued, "a woman runs a risk approaching one in a hundred of getting some kind of thrombosis and some of those thromboses are severe and even life threatening as well.
"So, that’s a risk that many women take, and accept quite willingly all the time, and it’s a far greater risk in fact than the risk we are seeing with this important vaccine that has the potential to get us all out of this dilemma."
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According to an article published in The Lancet last year, the rate of incidence of blood clots in women who take the pill is approximately 5 in 10,000 people.
The rate of those developing blood clots after receiving the Oxford jab is far lower, according to the Chief Executive of the vaccine regulator MHRA, Dr June Raine.
She said yesterday: "From these reports, the risk of this type of rare blood clot is about four people in a million who receive the vaccine."
Dr Raine assured the public that having the AstraZeneca vaccine continues to outweigh the risks for "the vast majority of people."
