British police are investigating a possible hate crime after a car hit pedestrians near a Muslim community center, injuring three people.
Police were called early Wednesday morning after a confrontation developed between four people in a car and a large group of people visiting a Muslim community center and mosque in the Cricklewood area of northwest London.
Officials said some anti-Muslim comments were made and the car reportedly sustained minor damage from some of the people from the center. It then sped off, mounting the pavement twice, and hitting three people without stopping.
Police said the injuries are not life threatening although two people needed hospital treatment. The case is not being treated as related to terrorism.
"It is being dealt with as an Islamophobic hate crime and it is being dealt with as a racist hate crime," Simon Rose, the metropolitan police chief superintendent, said.
The Hussaini Association, which had organized a lecture at the mosque, called the collision "a suspected premeditated Islamophobic attack."
In a statement, the group said the car "swerved into innocent bystanders" and the occupants were heard shouting anti-Islamic taunts just before the attack.
Police are searching for the car and its occupants, reported as three men and a woman.
"This incident is not being treated as terror-related but the hate crime aspect of the collision is being looked at by detectives as an aggravating factor," police said in a statement.
LONDON (AP) — The pharma giant AstraZeneca has requested that the European authorization for its COVID-19 vaccine be pulled, according to the EU medicines regulator.
In an update on the European Medicines Agency's website Wednesday, the regulator said that the approval for AstraZeneca's Vaxzevria had been withdrawn “at the request of the marketing authorization holder.”
AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine was first given the nod by the EMA in January 2021. Within weeks, however, concerns grew about the vaccine's safety, when dozens of countries suspended the vaccine's use after unusual but rare blood clots were detected in a small number of immunized people. The EU regulator concluded AstraZeneca's shot didn't raise the overall risk of clots, but doubts remained.
Partial results from its first major trial — which Britain used to authorize the vaccine — were clouded by a manufacturing mistake that researchers didn’t immediately acknowledge. Insufficient data about how well the vaccine protected older people led some countries to initially restrict its use to younger populations before reversing course.
Billions of doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were distributed to poorer countries through a U.N.-coordinated program, as it was cheaper and easier to produce and distribute. But studies later suggested that the pricier messenger RNA vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna provided better protection against COVID-19 and its many variants, and most countries switched to those shots.
The U.K.'s national coronavirus immunization program in 2021 heavily relied on AstraZeneca's vaccine, which was largely developed by scientists at Oxford University with significant financial government support. But even Britain later resorted to buying the mRNA vaccines for its COVID booster vaccination programs and the AstraZeneca vaccine is now rarely used globally.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
FILE - Medical staff prepares an AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine during preparations at the vaccine center in Ebersberg near Munich, Germany, Monday, March 22, 2021. The pharma giant AstraZeneca has requested that its European authorization for its COVID vaccine be pulled, according to the EU medicines regulator on Wednesday, May 8, 2024. (AP Photo/Matthias Schrader, FILE)
