Italy, Germany and France on Monday announced they would be pausing their rollout of the vaccine pending an assessment from the European Medicines Agency (EMA).

Spain suspended the use of the vaccine for at least two weeks.

The decision by Italian medicines agency AIFA came after talks between Health Minister Roberto Speranza and the ministers in Germany, France and Spain.

“The choices made and shared today by the main European countries on AstraZeneca have been taken purely as a precautionary measure pending the next decisive meeting of the European Medicines Agency,” Speranza said in a statement.

“We are confident that the European agency will already in the next few hours be able to definitively clarify this issue.”

The news comes just days after AIFA blocked the use of one batch of the vaccines, despite stressing that there was no established link between the vaccine and the alleged side-effects.

Denmark and Norway stopped giving the shot last week after reporting isolated cases of bleeding, blood clots and a low platelet count.

Iceland and Bulgaria followed suit before Ireland and the Netherlands announced suspensions on Sunday.

The northern Italian region of Piedmont on Sunday seized 393,600 doses of the vaccine as investigations were carried out after the death of a teacher who had received it the day before.

The woman, whose age has not been disclosed, died on Sunday in the town of Biella, north of Turin.

“This is an extreme precautionary measure, while waiting to see if a causal link exists between the vaccination and the death,” a statement from regional health advisor Luigi Genesio Icardi read.

On Sunday, health ministry inspectors arrived in Sicily in the south of the country to investigate the death there of a 43-year-old soldier last Tuesday after having received the vaccine.

The World Health Organization, Europe’s medicines watchdog, governments and experts have stressed that no causal link has been established between the vaccine and blood clotting and insisted that the vaccine is safe.

AstraZeneca, an Anglo-Swedish company which developed the vaccine with Oxford University, has defended the safety of its product.

“Around 17 million people in the EU and UK have now received our vaccine, and the number of cases of blood clots reported in this group is lower than the hundreds of cases that would be expected among the general population,” AstraZeneca’s chief medical officer Ann Taylor said in a statement.

“The nature of the pandemic has led to increased attention in individual cases and we are going beyond the standard practices for safety monitoring of licensed medicines in reporting vaccine events, to ensure public safety.”

AstraZeneca said additional tests were being carried out and said none of the re-tests had shown cause for concern.

A monthly safety report would be made public in the next week, the company said.

The Italian ban comes as the country is reviewing its vaccination program, aiming to significantly speed up the vaccine rollout between March and June and have 80 per cent of the population vaccinated by the end of September.