A strong earthquake has hit areas of Japan devastated by the tsunami 10 years ago, that saw thousands lose their lives.

The quake hit the coast about 220 miles (350km) north of Tokyo at 6.26pm local time (9.26am UK) and had a magnitude of 7, the USGS said. Japan’s Meterological Agency said the quake was 7.2 in magnitude.

There were warnings it had generated a one metre-high tsunami.

The Onagawa nuclear plant, just eight miles (12km) from the epicentre, has been halted and Tohoku Electric Power Co said it is checking for any irregularities, the broadcaster NHK said.

Tokyo Electric Power said the company was also checking the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station that was wrecked by the massive March 2011 quake, which led to nuclear meltdowns and the surrounding area deserted of people.

Several of the towns in Miyagi prefecture, including Onagawa and Ishinomaki, were hit badly by the 2011 tsunami and magnitude 9 quake have taken years to recover.

Miyagi Prefecture is said to have been suffering power outages in some areas, and at least one of the bullet trains that criss-cross Japan at high-speed has been halted.

Shizue Onodera told NHK from the shop where she works in the city of Ishinomaki: “It was a really bad, long shaking from side-to-side. It was even longer than the quake last month, but at least the building here is all right,”

“Lots of bottles smashed on the floor,” she said.

Footage from inside the bureau of NHK in Sendai – about 40miles (65km) from the epicentre – showed a plaque suspended from the ceiling shaking for about 30 seconds.

The quake could be felt in Tokyo about 250 miles (400km) south of the epicentre.

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But there is not much here to keep them alive.

A human tide of 300,000 Tigrayans are now camping in this beleaguered city at six schools, a local college and any number of half constructed buildings which dot the city.

A senior UN official told Sky News that 50,000-60,000 arrivals have turned up in the past few weeks alone.

After four months of warfare between Ethiopia’s national defence force and fighters from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), more than 500,000 Tigrayans have lost their homes.

Almost 60,000 have sought refugee status in neighbouring Sudan.

The majority here have made a hazardous journey from western Tigray. Some have been forced to flee their homes, others have been banished by militias from the neighbouring region of Amhara.

The US government, amongst others, has condemned the violence and declared these evictions ‘ethnic cleansing’.

At Tsehaye Elementary, buses and trucks piled up with people’s basic possessions, stop outside the school’s front gate every few minutes.

We stopped one woman called Letay Teweldebrehan who had arrived in Shire with her daughter just before nightfall.

“It must be a difficult time for you,” I said.

“Yes, very much, I cannot explain it. We came because of the war. We have been robbed of our things and our animals were taken.”

She told me she was a civil servant from a city called Humera and I asked why she felt she had to leave.

“I work in water development but I have not received my salary for the last four months. We don’t have water, no electricity or medicines. Life is not possible.”

As she readied herself for the night ahead, I asked where she thought she was going to sleep.

“I don’t know where. I have left my bed behind.”

There is no space left in the classrooms and the school playground is packed with families wrapped in blankets or balanced on bits of school furniture.

But if Ms Teweldebrehan does find a few square feet she will struggle to find anything else on offer.

Atsede Kidane, a mother of three, has been camping at the school for the past six weeks and she says the interim administration which now runs this region has not provided the residents with a single item of food.

She said: “Since registering here on 28 January I haven’t received a thing. My children are dying of hunger. We’ve had nothing so far.

“People are getting sick because they’re hungry. People are dying.”

Humanitarian organisations could not get into Shire until early March and although Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed has now given them “unfettered access” in Tigray they must operate in the region at their own risk.

His government declared the “law and order operation” – launched against the people who ran Tigray, the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) – a success in late November and it is not clear why it has been so slow to offer aid organisations access.

The delay raises important questions – has the central government been trying to hide serious human rights violations conducted by Ethiopian troops – as well acts committed by allied soldiers from Eritrea and Amhara region of Ethiopia?

Alternatively, does this foot-dragging reflect the fact that Ahmed’s administration has failed to bring large parts of the region under its control?

These matters are no concern of a priest called Teklehaimanot, who has brought his family of eight to Tshaye Elementary School.

His 28-year-old son, Fitsum, contracted a mental illness in the third year of university and his parents have found him difficult to control in the camp. They have decided to chain him to a wooden beam.

“It’s very difficult, we cannot sleep. At night, he tries to go out and he bothers the children, so we have to chain his hands and legs.”

Priest Teklehaimanot said they could not flee their home in a town called Tesgede because they could not leave Fitsum alone.

When the feared Amhara militia called ‘Fano’ turned up, they took everything the family possessed.

“This is my son, because of son, I cannot go anywhere. I don’t even have clothes.

“This is what I have. Everything has been taken, this is it.”

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It was January 2020. Vera Pekhteleva, a 23-year-old university student, had told her boyfriend their relationship was over.

She was living elsewhere and had found somebody new. When the grey metal door in a dingy corridor on Kemerovo’s Leningradsky Proskpekt shut behind her, she would not leave the flat again alive.

This week the case against her ex-boyfriend, Vladislav Kanyus, also 23, was sent back to the prosecutor’s office so that it could be resubmitted on charges of murder with particular cruelty.

Before remanding the case, the judge listed each of the 111 injuries Ms Pekhteleva sustained in the three-and-a-half-hours before Kanyus finally strangled her with the cord from an iron.

Kanyus fidgeted in the dock. He said he didn’t object to the tougher charges. He hadn’t meant to kill her, he said, he just wanted her screams to stop.

Ms Pekhteleva’s case hit the headlines last month after a domestic violence campaigner released audio files of the phone calls made by neighbours to police in the hours before she died.

You can hear her screaming in the background. The neighbours called emergency services seven times. They told the police operator it sounded like a “slaughterhouse” in there.

“Can you hear how she’s screaming behind the door?”, the neighbours say.

The operators, women themselves, appear indifferent.

“What am I supposed to do?”, one of them says. A male voice screams: “Where are the police? She’s getting f***** killed in there”, to which she replies, “the police will come, there’s no need to swear”.

By the time the neighbours broke the door down, Ms Pekhteleva was already dead. The police had still not arrived.

“For a year I tried my best not to listen to the recordings,” says Vladimir Pekhtelev, Vera’s uncle. “But I couldn’t help it in the end, they were on the TV.”

Only since the release of those recordings were charges brought against the call centre operators as well as the police officers on duty.

The potential penalty on grounds of criminal negligence was also increased from a fine to a possible five-year jail term.

Publicity works. “Society has helped the authorities look more closely at the case,” Mr Pekhtelev says. “Now it is up to the judges.”

Sky News approached the Kemerovo police force and local investigative committee for comment but has yet to receive a response.

Ms Pekhteleva’s murder was horrific but it was not unusual.

In 2018, the government statistics agency recorded a total of 8,300 women killed. That works out at 22 a day. Contrast that with the UK rate of one woman murdered every three days.

Like in Britain, NGOs say the majority of those happened in the home. The official number for domestic violence murders for 2018 was just 253.

Most European countries, especially given a widely reported increase in domestic violence during the pandemic, are toughening their laws. Russia is going the other way.

In 2017 Russia decriminalised first instance domestic battery, meaning anything which doesn’t end up in hospital is classified as an administrative offence. There is no specific category for violence by a relative. The penalty is the same as being punched by a stranger on the street.

“It’s much more dangerous when the threat exists in your home which is meant to be a safe place,” says Diana Barsegyan of the anti-domestic violence advocacy group, Nasiliu.net.

“Plus the victim must prove everything themselves and often the police don’t respond or come to investigate. They’re not educated, they don’t understand that violence can come in many forms. They don’t, for example, understand the idea of rape in a marriage.”

Working at Nasiliu.net just got that bit harder.

In December last year it was added to the justice ministry’s list of foreign agents, which now includes a wide range of civil society organisations.

All of its campaign material including guidance on shelters or hotlines for battered women now needs a gigantic “foreign agent” stamp on it.

“It’s a huge problem,” Ms Barsegyan says. “All our supporters understand it’s just a stupid law and we’re not agents of another country, but for people who don’t know it’s like a giant red flag, it marks us out as an enemy.”

There are important voices helping. Yuri Dud, Russia’s most influential YouTuber, just posted his support for Nasiliu.net on his Instagram page and asked his followers to help fund the organisation.

Margarita Gracheva, whose husband cut off her hands days after she begged police to protect her from him, is using her painfully won prominence to get the nation talking in a new TV show about domestic violence.

State media may avoid a host of issues but horrific domestic violence cases like Ms Gracheva’s and Ms Pekhteleva’s do make and stay in the headlines, especially when the failings of law enforcement are so clear to see.

But Russia is still very far from the concept of “male allies”. There is an old saying in Russia: “If he beats you, he loves you.” Many still believe it.

Ruslan Mellin is a trauma surgeon in the city of Kemerovo where Ms Pekhteleva was killed.

He says around 15% of the patients he operates on are the victims of domestic violence. When he’s back home, he draws them and the horrific sets of injuries they’ve sustained – each face with its own terrible tale.

“Faces are my passion,” he says. “It is not hard to draw them, it is hard to look at them doing my work, day in, day out.”

There is the 16-year-old girl whose partner attacked her with an axe, leaving her in a pool of her own blood. When she didn’t die, he threw her in the cellar for a month so that her injuries grew and healed into an appallingly mutilated face.

There is the emaciated creature whose partner brought her to the hospital only to sneak her out via an emergency exit when he realised her injuries would be reported to police.

“She reminded me of a dog that had been beaten up so often that she was ready do anything as long as nobody touched her and gave her food and water,” Mr Mellin says.

He doesn’t have any answers. “I don’t follow politics, I don’t know what kind of tools the authorities may have to influence the abusers. But I do wish something would change.”

Russia’s authorities do have plenty of tools to influence abusers but they don’t use them. Even as civil society tries to step forward, Russia has a leadership which looks back.

Efforts to protect women are seen by conservative lawmakers as an infringement on the rights of the family.

Regulation to punish political dissent is being rushed through at breakneck speed but the law to criminalise domestic violence languishes in parliament.

It is a criminal offence now to defame a veteran but it is not one to beat up your wife.

And without a progressive and systematic response to the problem of domestic violence from parliament to the courts and the police, Russia’s women will continue to die at the hands of those close to them.

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While the vaccine has been bankrolled by the American pharmaceutical giant, the science itself is the work of BioNTech, a German company founded by married couple and dedicated physicians Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci.

Dr Tureci was working on a way to harness the body’s immune system to tackle tumours when the pair learned last year of a mystery virus infecting people in China.

Over breakfast, they decided to apply the technology they’d been researching for two decades to the new threat, dubbing the effort “Project Lightspeed.”

Both COVID-19 vaccines Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna use messenger RNA (mRNA) to send genetic instructions to the human body’s cells for making proteins that prime it to attack the coronavirus.

The same principle can be applied to get the immune system to take on tumours.

“We have several different cancer vaccines based on mRNA,” Dr Tureci told the Associated Press.

Asked when such a therapy might be available, she replied: “That’s very difficult to predict in innovative development. But we expect that within only a couple of years, we will also have our vaccines (against) cancer at a place where we can offer them to people.”

On Friday, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier awarded the wife and husband one of the country’s highest decorations, the Order of Merit, during a ceremony attended by Chancellor Angela Merkel.

“You began with a drug to treat cancer in a single individual,” Mr Steinmeier told the couple. “And today we have a vaccine for all of humanity.”

Dr Tureci said ahead of the ceremony that getting the award was “indeed an honour”, but insisted developing the vaccine was the work of many.

“It’s about the effort of many: our team at BioNTech, all the partners who were involved, also governments, regulatory authorities, which worked together with a sense of urgency,” she said.

“The way we see it, this is an acknowledgement of this effort and also a celebration of science.”

Coming from humble beginnings as children of immigrants, scientists and entrepreneurs Professor Sahin, 55, and Dr Tureci, 53, are now among the 100 richest Germans, with the value of their company BioNTech soaring to $21bn (£16bn) in the wake of the vaccine breakthrough.

Mr Sahin, who was born in Turkey and is a trained doctor, is the chief executive officer of BioNTech, and turned his focus to researching immunotherapy.

Dr Tureci, who is the company’s chief medical officer, was born in Germany and is the daughter of a Turkish physician who migrated to the country from Istanbul.

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Italy, Latvia and Lithuania have said they will resume using the Oxford-AstraZeneca COVID vaccine after the European medicines regulator declared it was “safe and effective”.

Sweden says it will take a decision about its paused rollout next week.

Around a dozen European countries had suspended its use earlier this week after reports of rare blood disorders in a handful of people who had recently received the jab.

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The European Medicines Agency (EMA) said the benefits outweigh the risks – and the vaccine is not linked to an “overall risk” of blood clots.

However, the agency’s safety committee has also said it can’t rule out a potential link with a “small number of cases” of a rare clotting disorder occurring after the vaccination.

It has therefore recommended governments “raise awareness” of the possible effects by including them in product information.

“Drawing attention to these possible rare conditions and providing information to healthcare professionals and vaccinated people will help to spot and mitigate the possible side effects,” said EMA executive director Emer Cooke.

Earlier on Thursday, the UK’s medicines regulator said people who experience a persistent headache for more than four days after the jab should seek medical attention, as should anyone with bruising in places other than the site of injection.

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said this new advice was a “precautionary measure” after a “very small” number of reports of sinus vein thrombosis (CVST) occurring with thrombocytopenia after the vaccine.

CVST is an extremely rare form of blood clot, while thrombocytopenia describes a low number of platelets – the cells that help clot blood.

Concerns about the vaccine were initially raised after a report from the Norwegian Medicines Agency revealed blood clotting events in four adults who had the COVID jab.

AstraZeneca also said after a thorough review of its COVID-19 immunisation data, that it found no evidence of any increased risk of blood clots in any age group or gender in any country.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) added its weight behind the debate ahead of the EMA’s announcement, urging countries to continue using the jab.

In the UK, there have been five cases of these co-occurring conditions reported to the MHRA after vaccination.

That’s a rate of one in one million vaccinated people. The MHRA said this could also naturally occur whether people have had the jab or not, or if they have COVID.

Analysis: Trust in AstraZeneca’s jab may still be hard to overcome in some EU nations
By Michelle Clifford, Europe correspondent

The EMA’s conclusion that the AstraZeneca vaccine is safe was widely expected. The European regulator had already said this week that the benefits outweighed any risk.

But experts still had to look at the reported cases of blood clots in those who had the jab in Europe, case by case.

It was, the EMA said, not just an issue of safety but of public confidence – and the issue of trust may yet prove hard to overcome in many nations.

The decision early on by Germany and France not to give the jab to the elderly led to questions and nervousness amongst many in the wider population. It wasn’t hard in EU vaccine centres to find people asking for an alternative.

And the blood clots development – although now scientifically dismissed (except in a tiny number of very rare cases which are still being examined) – may leave a sense of worry among those waiting their turn for a vaccine.

The EMA said European nations who had halted the vaccine rollout could now take an informed decision about whether to restart.

But there’s still the issue of supply which has led to rancour between the EU and UK. European Commission President Ursula Von Der Leyen threatening to block exports across the channel because of a need at home. She accused AstraZenenca of failing its commitments to meet EU vaccine orders.

Even if it does now, will everyone want them?

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Paris is among 16 regions of France facing new lockdowns from midnight tomorrow, the country’s prime minister Jean Castex has announced.

He said the nation was in a third wave because of coronavirus variants.

Schools will remain open under the latest measures, but all non-essential shops will be required to close.

The lockdown will last for a month.

French authorities have gone to great lengths to avoid re-imposing the strictest measures, having previously opted for weekend lockdowns and nightly curfews instead.

Skyrocketing case numbers, however, along with a slow vaccine rollout has forced the government to bolster its strategy.

It comes as France on Thursday reported a further 34,998 cases of COVID-19 – down slightly from the more than 38,000 new infections the day before.

Another 268 people have also died, bringing the country’s total fatality toll to 91,679.

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The European Medicines Agency (EMA) is due to give its statement on the safety of the company’s vaccine on Thursday afternoon.

Most countries in the European Union have paused their use of the vaccine after asking for a review into a small number of cases where people have developed blood clots after being vaccinated.

The likelihood is that the agency will offer its reassurance that the AstraZeneca product is safe to use, and that the danger of any potential side-effects is far, far outweighed by the benefits that the vaccine can give an individual.

That is the position that has been stated by just about every prominent figure in the British medical community over the past few days.

Germany, by contrast, said it could not risk exposing citizens to unexplained dangers in a state-sponsored campaign, and that to do so would be immoral.

Neither side has seemed to relent in their conviction, although both agree that a swift, decisive and clear response from the EMA would be the best outcome.

That decision would bring some official closure, and it’s likely that vaccination programmes would restart almost immediately.

Despite accusations that the EU’s actions, in querying the safety of the vaccine, were politically motivated, this seems unlikely.

Most European leaders are far more worried about accusations of being too ponderous with their vaccine rollout than they are about some row with an international pharmaceutical company.

What they need, in order to save reputations and rebuild the confidence of voters, is a faster, more efficient vaccination programme. And that is where AstraZeneca’s second headache comes in.

The company’s relationship with the EU has been fractious, at best, over the past few months, marred by arguments over why it was failing to supply Europe with the number of doses that had been ordered. Tensions have simmered.

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Now, that acrimony has boiled over. Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, castigated the company for not providing enough vaccine doses.

What particularly irks Brussels diplomats is that the UK has, by contrast, consistently received exactly the supply that it ordered.

The British response to that is to point out that it not only backed the development of the vaccine, but also ordered it first, so deserves to get preferential treatment.

The EU retorts by pointing out that about ten million vaccine doses that were manufactured in European countries have been exported to the UK, while absolutely none have come in the opposite direction.

And now Mrs von der Leyen has raised the spectre of banning the export of vaccines.

She didn’t mention any target specifically but it’s clear that she was thinking of the UK when she said that the bloc was considering “all options”, adding: “If the situation does not change, we will have to reflect on how to make exports to vaccine-producing countries dependent on their level of openness.”

The threat is clear – either you start sending vaccines over to us, or we might stop sending vaccines over to you.

And the pressure is on. Across Europe, infection rates are beginning to rise again, sometimes sharply.

New restrictions have been introduced in Poland while, in France, Prime Minister Jean Castex is expected to announce new curbs, potentially including the return to some form of lockdown in Paris.

In Germany, Italy and beyond, politicians are having to face the prospect of tightening restrictions, rather than the easing they had hoped for. Everyone agrees that vaccinating populations is the only solution; the argument is how to get there.

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European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has threatened to block vaccine exports to the UK and other countries with markedly higher rollouts of coronavirus jabs.

The EU’s delivery of COVID vaccines has been slower compared with the UK rollout, where nearly 25 million adults have now had their first dose.

With the bloc facing a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic, Ms von der Leyen said: “We are in the crisis of the century.

“If this situation does not change, we will have to reflect on how to make exports to vaccine-producing countries, dependent on their level of openness.

“We will reflect on whether exports to countries who have higher vaccination rates than us are still proportionate.”

The 27-nation bloc has been facing an acute shortage of COVID-19 vaccines for some time.

Ms von der Leyen spoke as six EU countries complained to Brussels about reduced deliveries that are hampering the bloc’s troubled inoculation programme.

She has previously admitted a country on its own – such as the UK – can act as a “speedboat” compared with the EU’s “tanker” in the delivery of COVID-19 jabs.

Her latest comments risk escalating tensions with the UK and US over their restrictive approach to deliveries of vaccines in the EU.

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Companies in the UK “still cannot guarantee that their supply chains are free from forced labour” from the Uighur people in Xinjiang in China, a House of Commons select committee has warned.

The Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee also called on the government to impose sanctions on Chinese officials implicated in human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

The committee’s report, Uighur Forced Labour In Xinjiang And UK Value Chains, investigated the extent to which products sold in the UK can be traced back to forced labour camps in the region.

China has repeatedly denied there is forced labour in Xinjiang, calling such accusations “fabrications”.

All of the companies that responded to the committee said that they did not source products directly from factories or suppliers based there.

Several had outlined the steps they had taken to better understand their supply chains.

But no company could guarantee that raw cotton used in their products did not at least partly originate from Xinjiang.

“Given that evidence of serious human rights abuses in Xinjiang has been widely reported over many years, we are appalled that companies still cannot guarantee that their supply chains are free from forced labour,” the committee said.

The committee called on the government to examine creating a whitelist of companies that have taken steps to ensure their supply chains do not use forced labour from Xinjiang and a blacklist of companies that have not provided similar assurances.

It also said the government should consider sanctions on individuals in China.

“We are disappointed that Magnitsky sanctions have not yet been imposed on Chinese officials implicated in human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

“Given that the US Government has imposed such targeted sanctions, we do not accept the argument that the UK government has insufficient evidence to impose new sanctions.”

Named after a Russian accountant who uncovered widespread corruption, Magnitsky sanctions are financial penalties that can be imposed on individuals believed to have committed human rights abuses. They were laid out in the sanctions Act in July 2020.

Sergei Magnitsky, refused to withdraw his accusations of corruption, was arrested and died of mistreatment in prison in 2009.

The report also looked beyond retail businesses, to technology and media companies including social media giant TikTok and Walt Disney.

The committee said it was deeply “concerned about the flow of information between TikTok UK, its parent company ByteDance Ltd and other subsidiary companies” subject to China’s National Intelligence Law, which requires companies to provide information to Chinese security services.

A TikTok spokesperson told Sky News: “As we made clear to the committee in both our written response and appearance, the TikTok app is not available in China, TikTok user data is held on secure servers in the US and Singapore and we have strict access controls in order.”

The committee also wrote to Disney about the production of its movie Mulan, which was filmed in Xinjiang, saying the company has “a responsibility to demonstrate that none of their actions supported oppression or undermined human rights during the production” of the film.

It said Disney had given a written response to the committee’s questions but had declined an invitation to give oral evidence and “engage meaningfully in our enquiry”.

A spokesperson for Walt Disney told Sky News: “We respect the role and views of the Select Committee and when approached by the Committee we provided relevant background and robust written testimony to them.”

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UK leaders and medical professionals have joined in their defence of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine after some European countries – including Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, France and Sweden – paused its use due to concerns over possible adverse side effects.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said there was “no reason at all” to stop the vaccine’s rollout and Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said she would accept her jab “without hesitation” when called on.

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And the European Union’s medical regulator has also weighed in – insisting the vaccine’s benefits outweighed the risk of side effects.

Now, France has said it expects inoculations there to resume after a European Medicines Agency (EMA) meeting later on Tuesday.

Blood clots and the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab: What does the data say?

The EMA said “many thousands of people” develop blood clots every year in the EU and “the number of thromboembolic events overall in vaccinated people seems not to be higher than that seen in the general population”.

Sky News science correspondent Thomas Moore said that out of the five million people who have had the vaccine across the continent, there have been 30 reports of blood clots.

Live updates on this and all other COVID stories from the UK and around the world

He added: “In a population of that size, you’d expect one in 1,000 or around 100 a week developing a blood clot, even without vaccination.”

Both the WHO and the EMA are meeting separately on Tuesday to discuss the issue.

The EMA has been working closely with AstraZeneca, experts in blood disorders, and authorities including the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and will report those findings in preparation for an extraordinary meeting on Thursday to consider any further action that may be needed.

Mr Johnson described the MRHA as “one of toughest and most experienced regulators in the world”.

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“They see no reason at all to discontinue the vaccination programme… for either of the vaccines that we’re currently using,” he said.

Dr Soumya Swaminathan, WHO’s chief scientist, told a media briefing “we do not want people to panic”, as she said no association has been found so far between blood clots and COVID-19 vaccines.

She said the rates at which blood clots have occurred in people who received the AstraZeneca vaccine “are in fact less than what you would expect in the general population”.

Clinical epidemiologist Dr Deepti Gurdasani said she believed the European countries’ decision to pause the AstraZeneca rollout was out of “an abundance of caution”.

Dr Gurdasani told Sky News there is no evidence so far of a link, but that because public confidence has “taken a hit” it is “important” the concerns are investigated “thoroughly but quickly”.

However, she added that even if the vaccine is found to cause a small number of incidents, people should still take the jab.

“The benefit of taking the vaccine far outweighs the risk, even if these events were linked to the vaccine – which we don’t know that they are at the moment,” she said.

“The risk of dying from COVID and the vulnerability of the age groups currently taking the vaccine is very high.”

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