Rollout of the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine should be temporarily suspended after reports of blood clotting elsewhere in Europe, Ireland’s deputy chief medical officer has said.

Serious blood clotting has been recorded after inoculations in Norway, where the AstraZeneca vaccine programme has been paused along with the rollout in Denmark.

In the run-up to Easter 2020, Melissa Darby felt constantly sick. Around two weeks before, the country had gone into its first national lockdown on 23 March, and daily press conferences told us how many people had contracted and died from the novel coronavirus that had upturned our lives. But it wasn’t the news alone alone that was unsettling Darby. The 31-year-old also noticed that smells felt unusually overpowering. At the suggestion of her mother, she took a pregnancy test on Good Friday. When it came back positive, she started crying.

“It was the height of the panic at the very beginning when we didn’t know [who] was going to survive,” she tells The Independent from the home she shares with her husband Jack in south London. “No one wanted to go to hospitals and they were filling up and it was a really scary time.”

Britain’s vaccination programme is the “envy of the world”, the Scottish secretary Alister Jack will claim as the latest government figures showed over 23.6 million people have received a first dose.

Paying tribute to the NHS and the armed services who have helped administer Covid-19 jabs, the cabinet minister will describe the rollout so far as a “truly astonishing achievement, a task on a scale that dwarfs anything since the war”.

Ashley Cowburn has more here:

Welcome to The Independent’s live coverage of Covid-19.