AstraZeneca Covid vaccine related to deadly disease

AstraZeneca Covid vaccine made in collaboration with Oxford University has a risk of a rare but deadly blood clotting disorder known as vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (VITT).

British-Swedish pharma company AstraZeneca announced this on Thursday after a week researchers had found the risk.

VITT is not unknown and it emerged as a new disease after the administration of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, known as Covishield in India and Vaxzevria in Europe, during the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2021.

The reason for VITT was found to be “an unusually dangerous blood autoantibody directed against a protein termed platelet factor 4 (or PF4)”.

In the studies conducted in 2023, researchers from Canada, North America, Germany, and Italy described an almost identical condition featuring the PF4 antibody, which proved fatal in certain instances after contracting a natural adenovirus infection, commonly associated with the common cold.

In a new research, Australia's Flinders University along with other experts found that PF4 antibodies in adenovirus infection-associated VITT as well as classic adenoviral vector VITT were sharing similar molecular fingerprints.

Professor Tom Gordon from Flinders said, “Indeed, the pathways of lethal antibody production in these disorders must be virtually identical and have similar genetic risk factors.”