Earlier this week we looked into claims around the AstraZeneca vaccine. At the time of our fact check, 17 European nations, including France and Germany, had temporarily paused administering the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine, pending results of an investigation into blood clots from the European Medicines Agency.

Around 30 cases of “thromboembolic events” (meaning an issue relating to a blood clot blocking a blood vessel) had been reported in the five million people who had received the AstraZeneca vaccine in the European Economic Area.

Professor David Spiegelhalter, chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University calculated that, with a group of five million, you would expect to see 100 people a week develop blood clots, irrespective of any vaccine. This is significantly more than the 30 instances seen over a month following the AstraZeneca vaccine.

In clinical trials, where healthy people were given the vaccine, and a control group were given either a placebo or meningitis injection, there were slightly fewer serious adverse events in those who got the actual vaccine.

The UK’s regulator, the MHRA, said yesterday that the available evidence does not suggest that blood clots in veins are caused by COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca.

Since we published our fact check, the European Medicines Agency has found the vaccine is “not associated” with a higher risk of clots, and many EU countries have now said they will resume using the vaccine.

It’s been claimed in a post shared hundreds of times on Facebook that a woman who was arrested during the vigil for Sarah Everard on Clapham Common in March 2021 is the same woman who was injured during an attack on a London Underground train in Parsons Green in 2017. The post also suggests some kind of conspiracy between the two events.

But in fact, these are two different women.

When the vigil in Clapham was broken up by police last week, photographs of attendee Patsy Stevenson being restrained by police officers were shared by multiple news outlets. 

On 15 September 2017, a bomb partially exploded on a London Underground train at Parsons Green, west London, injuring around 50 people. Several news outlets carried pictures of an injured red-headed woman in their reports of the attack. She was later identified in news reports as Victoria Holloway, when she and other passengers gave evidence to court about what they witnessed. 

Ms Stevenson and Ms Holloway both have red hair, but they are clearly not the same person.

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On Monday 22 March, Full Fact’s Chief Executive Will Moy will be speaking on the panel for the Institute for Government’s event: ‘How can governments combat the spread of misinformation?'