New EU vaccine probe deepens Europe's COVID woes

Europe's stuttering vaccine rollout faced multiple hurdles on Friday as EU regulators said they were reviewing side effects of the Johnson & Johnson shot and France further limited its use of the AstraZeneca jab. Much of the world is still in the clutches of the pandemic that has killed 2.9 million people, from Brazil, where the virus is killing more than 4,000 people a day, to Japan where the government has tightened restrictions once again. India is also suffering, and hotspot Maharashtra state is running out of vaccines as the health system buckles under the weight of the contagion. And across Europe populations are facing some of the world's toughest anti-virus measures, yet the epidemic refuses to be curbed. All of France is subjected to restrictions of some form, and the country has so far doled out jabs to more than 10 million people. But it has repeatedly changed the rules on AstraZeneca's vaccine, first over doubts about its efficacy, then over fears that it could be linked to blood clots. On Friday it did so again, with Health Minister Olivier Veran saying citizens under 55 who had been given a first shot with AstraZeneca would be given a different vaccine for their...