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The United States plans to send roughly 4 million doses of AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine that it is not using to Mexico and Canada in loan deals with the two countries, an administration official told Reuters on Thursday. Mexico will receive 2.5 million doses of the vaccine and Canada will receive 1.5 million doses, the official said. “This virus has no borders,” the official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. “We only put the virus behind us if we’re helping our global partners.” (Mason, 3/18)

The decision to send Astra­Zeneca vaccine to Mexico as well as to Canada is expected to be announced Friday. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had asked President Biden to help them fill vaccine shortfalls in recent talks. Mexican and U.S. officials who described the agreement said it was not a quid pro quo conditioning the delivery of vaccine doses on an enforcement crackdown. Rather, the United States made clear it sought help from Mexico in managing a record influx of Central American teenagers and children. Mexico pledged to take back more Central American families “expelled” under a U.S. emergency health order, while also urging Biden to share the U.S. vaccine supply, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the conversations. (Miroff, DeYoung and Sieff, 3/18)

KHN: The Case For Donating US Covid Vaccines Overseas

A Senate committee grilled federal officials about the shortage of vaccines to protect Americans against a pandemic virus. Two months later, the U.S. public had lost interest in the virus, and millions of vaccines were sitting in warehouses — although poor countries still needed them. This happened during the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic. One official on the hot seat was Dr. Nicole Lurie, who was in charge of preparedness and response at the Department of Health and Human Services. Today, she’s a senior adviser at the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, which is helping to vaccinate the world against covid. And she’s worried about history repeating itself. (Allen, 3/19)

The European Union’s drug regulatory agency said Thursday that the AstraZeneca vaccine doesn’t increase the overall incidence of blood clots and that the benefits of using it outweigh the possible risks, paving the way for European countries to resume dispensing the shots. France, Italy and Germany promptly announced they will start using the vaccine again on Friday. Spain, Portugal and the Netherlands said they will do so next week, though Spain said it might exclude certain groups to minimize any danger. (Cheng and Jordans, 3/18)

The European Medicines Agency has ruled that the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine is safe and effective, despite some concerns over possible side effects. The announcement Thursday comes after more than a dozen EU nations halted the use of the AstraZeneca shot, which was developed with the University of Oxford, after around 30 cases of blood clots. A few other countries stopped using individual batches of the vaccine. (Amaro, 3/18)

Over the past week, we’ve seen a domino effect in Europe with country after country hitting pause on the administration of AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine. The concern stems from a small number of cases of serious blood clotting, which have not been definitively linked to the vaccine and don’t appear to be more frequent than what’s seen in the general population. (Garde and Feuerstein, 3/19)

A coronavirus variant first detected in Brazil poses less of a threat to vaccines developed by AstraZeneca and Pfizer than researchers first worried, according to new findings announced Thursday by Oxford University. "The results suggest that P1 [the Brazil variant] might be less resistant to vaccine and convalescent immune responses than B1351, and similar to B117,"  Professor Gavin Screaton, lead scientist on the study, said in part in a release posted Thursday by Oxford University. (Rivas, 3/18)