COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AFP) — Following several other European countries, Danish health officials on Friday approved the use of the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine for people over 65, citing evidence from a study on the vaccine in Scotland.
Until now, the Scandinavian country has argued there was insufficient evidence for the effectiveness of the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company’s vaccine to recommend to people over the age of 65.
“The results from Scotland are pleasing. They show a strongly reduced risk of hospitalisation for Covid-19, also among the elderly,” Bolette Soborg, director of the Danish Health Authority, said in a statement.
“We could also see a tendency to this from the limited data we had from the approval studies for the vaccine. This is now confirmed on a large scale,” she added.
In Denmark, one of the EU countries with the fastest rollout of its vaccination campaign, 8.3 percent of the population has received a first dose of a vaccine, and 3.2 percent have received both doses.
The country expects that the entire adult population will have been offered a vaccination by the end of June.
© Agence France-Presse
