Abstract/Summary

Several European countries have suspended the inoculation of the AstraZeneca vaccine out of suspicion that it causes deep vein thrombosis. In this letter, we report some Fermi estimates performed using a stochastic model aimed at making a risk–benefit analysis of the interruption of the delivery of the AstraZeneca vaccine in France and Italy. Our results clearly show that excess deaths due to the interruption of the vaccination campaign injections largely overrun those due to thrombosis even in worst case scenarios of frequency and gravity of the vaccine side effects. We analyze, in the framework of epidemiological modeling, the stop in the deployment of the AstraZeneca vaccine due to some suspected side effects. Indeed, a few dozen suspicious cases of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) over 5×106 vaccinations have arisen in Europe and pushed several European countries to suspend AstraZeneca injections. Using both an epidemiological susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered model and statistical analysis of publicly available data, we estimate the excess deaths resulting from missing inoculations of the vaccine and those potentially linked to DVT side effects in France and Italy. We find that, despite the many simplifications and limitations in our analysis, the excess deaths differ by at least an order of magnitude in the two strategies, that the relative benefits are wider in situations where the reproduction number is larger, and they increase with the temporal duration of the vaccine ban.