AstraZeneca, which announced on Feb 1st that it plans to cut 3,000 jobs worldwide over the next three years, will lay off an additional 850 staff in Sweden in the same period with the aim of improving productivity by 30 percent, the drugs group said in a statement.
The additional Swedish reduction will begin this year, when 450 jobs will go, starting with voluntary redundancies and early retirement, it said.
Specific plans for the following two years are yet to be formalised.
Talks with employees and unions over the measure began at the end of last year, it added.
AstraZeneca, formed from the merger of the UK’s Zeneca PLC and Sweden’s Astra AB in 1999, employs 12,800 people in Sweden and 65,000 worldwide.
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Norway, which has suspended the use of AstraZeneca's Covid vaccine until further notice, will send 216,000 doses to Sweden and Iceland at their request, the Norwegian health ministry said Thursday.
“I’m happy that the vaccines we have in stock can be put to use even if the AstraZeneca vaccine has been paused in Norway,” Health Minister Bent Høie said in a statement.
The 216,000 doses, which are currently stored in Norwegian fridges, have to be used before their expiry dates in June and July.
Sweden will receive 200,000 shots and Iceland 16,000 under the expectation they will return the favour at some point.
“If we do resume the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine, we will get the doses back as soon as we ask,” Høie said.
Like neighbouring Denmark, Norway suspended the use of the AstraZeneca jab on March 11 in order to examine rare but potentially severe side effects, including blood clots.
Among the 134,000 AstraZeneca shots administered in Norway before the suspension, five cases of severe thrombosis, including three fatal ones, had been registered among relatively young people in otherwise good health. One other person died of a brain haemorrhage.
READ MORE: Norway delays final decision on withdrawal of AstraZeneca vaccine
The government has therefore set up a committee of Norwegian and international experts tasked with studying all of the risks linked to the AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines, which is also suspected of causing blood clots.
Both are both based on adenovirus vector technology. Denmark is the only European country to have dropped the AstraZeneca
vaccine from its vaccination campaign, and said on Tuesday it would “lend” 55,000 doses to the neighbouring German state of Schleswig-Holstein.
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