BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.

Hello, I've been working with the newscast team all day on the program,

and I'm now going to begin at the end

because it is just before 10 PM my time here in Brussels

I've been hanging on to listen to the German Chancellor Angela Merkel who had another announcement to make about the

AstraZeneca vaccine and don't we all know that Germany along with so much of Europe has had

a real on again off again relationship with AstraZeneca. You remember the blood clot concerns that were then

dismissed a couple of weeks ago, well Germany has now announced that it will stop the use

of the vaccine for the under 60s.

Angela Merkel said they've now had 31 cases of rare blood clots

in people who've had the astrozenica vaccine,

most of them women under the age of 60, and for that reason they're stopping

the use of the vaccine. More than 2 million Germans, Angela Merkel said, have already

had one dose of

AstraZeneca and they'll now have to wait till the end of April to find

out whether their second jab can come from a different vaccine or what the

medical judgment will be by that point. Angela Merkel looked NACER. the medical

look nackered I have to say. She knows Germany as many other European

countries is short of vaccine supplies. This is not an ideal situation to now not be able to use

it for the under 60s. But she insisted this was about building trust and saying to Germans

that even very, very rare occurrences like these blood clots

would be taken seriously and investigated and that's why the government and the medical authorities of Germany have taken the decision.

...