Thus, governments are facing a dilemma: to respect the interests of pharmaceutical companies that often have their headquarters or production sites in their own countries refraining from using the legal rights they may have to impose a liberalization, or to take actions to stop the pandemic in less wealthy countries.
The latter decision would be justified by the indirect economic damage foreseen for the medium term. Its extent would indeed make convenient to suspend intellectual property rights, even if a substantial compensation had to be recognized to pharmaceutical companies. In principle this would be convenient to everybody, because the estimated impact on the world economy of this pandemic is much larger than the maximum expected gain of the pharmaceutical industries, even if the entire world population were vaccinated.
Moreover, recognizing as a priority a mass vaccination in the lower-income countries would reduce the risk of the spread of new mutations of the virus that eventually would reach and strike the richest countries. But perhaps this is not considered to be bad news by the producers.
In this context, the decision of rich countries seems to have been to protect the interests of the big companies, even if this is achieved indirectly, putting under the rug the need of a worldwide vaccination and affirming the priority of vaccinating their own citizens.
In this way, the attention is shifted to the issue of vaccine safety and neglects the fact that inequalities in vaccinations and their delay in less wealthy countries will contribute to the increase in insecurity and the risk of future infections.
The recent suspension of the AstraZeneca vaccine in many European countries is an example of this shift. The facts are known. A number of deaths and thrombosis in some cases of a rare type led several European countries to suspend the application of AstraZeneca vaccines. These decisions were taken despite the fact that according to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and WHO, there was no evidence of a connection of these cases with the vaccination and despite the absolute statistical irrelevance of the data.
Even assuming the confirmation of such a connection, the risk of dying from an adverse case of vaccination would still be largely lower than that of dying from COVID-19. This conclusion, incontrovertible at global level, does not change except for the different assessment of how much the risk would be lower if distinctions are made according to age and gender.
In the specific case of thrombosis, according to data from the first 21 million vaccination in Great Britain, with comparable numbers of Pfizer and AstraZeneca vaccinations (around 10 million, Pfizer being more, at about 10%), the observed cases of pulmonary embolism and lack of platelets are in the same number, while those of deep vein thrombosis are greater in the case of AstraZeneca, but in any case, they are not greater than the normal incidence.
