It's underreported, but the EU hesitance towards the AZ vaccine really started with the Danish government putting the vaccine on hold. Hours after, Austria followed and many other EU nations.
Whereas it may make sense to err on the side of safety for the Danish government, who has already vaccinated the oldest and weakest 10 percent of population, who has no third wave yet, who can afford the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, who has the infrastructure for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and who has a generally well educated population, it really complicates things in many other places.
I live in Bulgaria, where the population and even health care personnel are already skeptical. Medical doctors are old, many don't speak English. They get their news from Russia. My own physician called her patients warning us not to get a jab back in February. A third wave is well underway now. When people here heard about richer and more well functioning nations suspending the vaccine, they lost the last confidence.
Although Bulgaria has since reassumed vaccinations with AZ, I fear the damage is done. Few people are getting a jab now.
I really wish richer nations would think more globally before they rush to such decisions. Thousands of people will die in poorer nations due to the delays it causes.
I honestly have a hard time following that line of reasoning.
It's always like: "These vaccines are dangerous, what about sideeffects? You're hiding the sideeffects!"
Then countries and health authorities show that they're very sensitive when sideeffects show up and do a careful investigation. Now being extra careful is criticized as undermining trust in vaccines? (I guess if they had decided to not pause that would've also caused claims that this undermines trust in vaccines, as they're ignoring sideeffects.)
I'm not even saying pausing was the right decision. It was a tough call and I wouldn't want to be in a position to make that call.
But I guess there's one undeniable fact: The Anti-Vax crowd will use whatever happens to construct new bullshit arguments. There's no way to prevent that, and I think the best thing to do about it is to ignore those people as much as possible.
The anti-vax crowd is complete nonsense, but the feeling I got from Italy wasn't so much "see! vaccines are dangerous! I am not getting a jab!, but rather "it looks like AstraZeneca may not be entirely safe, I demand a Moderna or Pfizer jab!".
Due to extremely skewed media coverage of the recent events, it may also be almost justifiable as a general reaction of population. If people are told that a vaccine has a rare but lethal side effect, and they are not in at-risk category, and there are two other vaccines that seem safer, it is almost reasonable to wait the other one. The main issue has been communication by media which made the investigation into side-effect seem much more severe than what it really was, undermining people trust in AZ. I think newspapers made an horrible job at it.
I would definitely still get the AZ vaccine, but I kind of understand where people are coming from, given the message given by media and their number-illiteracy that does not allow them to understand probability and the scale of numbers.
The minute-by-minute story of vaccines emerging over the past year has turned everyone into an armchair immunologist. Most people wouldn't normally have a clue who's making a vaccine they need for travel etc, let alone how they compare, but now people act like they're picking from a wine menu.
The reality is we're damn well lucky to have any vaccine at all, and only a year after the pandemic kicked off.
It's a good thing if people try to get informed. The pandemic and its handling by the authorities has unfortunately shown that "the authorities" don't always make the right choices and don't always provide the right data.
If the vaccines are safe, it should be easy for the authorities to provide data that shows they are safe.
Of course trusting the authorities is a valid life choice, to each their own.
> If the vaccines are safe, it should be easy for the authorities to provide data that shows they are safe.
A portion of that crowd refuse to acknowledge their safety without more data about their possible long term side-effects, which inevitably takes time that we don't really have.
Then that portion of the crowd have to make their own decisions. As I said, uncertainty should also be communicated. How exactly do the authorities handle the issue of long term side effects? Presumably they base their decision on some kind of reasoning?
> It's a good thing if people try to get informed.
Do they get informed though? It seems they mostly get articles written by journalists who don't really understand the issue either, sprinkled with a few quotes from professionals that often get taken out of context.
I don't think we're turning the population into experts. They're not able to judge the effectiveness, risk and side-effects of any measure. I'm not sure "a little bit of knowledge, some fear and a lot of opinion" is a benefit.
It is the responsibility of the authorities to provide appropriate information. If they fail to do that - maybe something is wrong with the authorities. I don't think they can simply blame "journalists". In my European country, for example, there is even a "public TV" system that gets funding of several billion dollars every year. If they can not find some good journalists for that money, what can they even be trusted with?
I mean they DO have the information, right? We assume they are making "informed" decisions, so the information should be available (including uncertainty, which would also be information - the degree of uncertainty, that is).
> It is the responsibility of the authorities to provide appropriate information.
What good is information without knowledge? What can a random citizen do with a medical study but shrug and say "I guess?"
> If they can not find some good journalists for that money, what can they even be trusted with?
Journalists have increasingly transitioned from understanding themselves as a public watchdog to explaining government policies.
But even if they hadn't, journalists are fundamentally "citizens with typewriters", they are generally not experts on the topics they cover, and I'm sure you've noticed that on topics you know a lot about. Even if you agree with their general description, they'll get a lot of details wrong, and somebody who doesn't know the topic at all won't gain a lot by reading an article written by someone who also doesn't really know the topic. It's like playing Chinese Whispers, where you whisper something into another player's ear, they repeat it to the next person and so on until something totally different makes it back to you.
I sure hope they have some information, but I don't think that politicians are making informed decisions. I believe, they delegate the decision to (who they believe to be the best) experts. It's unreasonable to expect career politicians to e.g. understand how exactly viral infections are spreading, how that will affect some part of the population during some specific seasonal weather that we're expecting with such and such probability etc. What they can do is ask their favorite topic expert who hopefully understands all that and tells them to push this button or that one.
But beyond giving that expert room in a news paper to say what they told the politician, what can be done? Surely they can't just compress 6 years of intense studying of the topic at hand into an article and expect citizens to be "up to speed" and able to make informed decisions?
"What good is information without knowledge? What can a random citizen do with a medical study but shrug and say "I guess?"
A lot of people have knowledge, they know maths, they may be doctors, they may know doctors. And they can learn the same way doctors or experts learn. What exactly enables experts to understand a thing, and not "random people"?`
Even if you are not a doctor, you can check a study to see if basic aspects check out. For example I saw a study promoting mask use, but it was based on an experiment with hamsters. So personally I would say that is interesting, but not quite enough to force billions of people to wear masks.
You can check if they do randomized trials and so on. You don't need to be an expert to do that. Or you can check who wrote the study (like "Wuhan lab for genetic experiments on viral diseases" that finds it certainly, under no circumstances, originated in a lab), lots of things you can do without being an expert.
Do you trust experts? There is actually research that shows you shouldn't, in general (not just for Covid).
> What exactly enables experts to understand a thing, and not "random people"?
Mastery of the domain. Yes, any random person (of sufficient intellect) can become an expert in any topic for all intents and purposes. But it takes a lot of time and effort that they'll have to devote to it. I don't think it's reasonably to expect that everyone will be an expert in everything, and it definitely isn't efficient.
With lots of things, you can do general plausibility checks, but you'll miss essentially all of the non-trivial issues if you're not experienced with the methodologies and tools. It's like asking somebody with no programming experience to judge the merits of some architectural choice. They won't be able to make an informed decision and you can't present a complete picture of the intricacies and implications in a 30 minute talk.
From my experience, your average general physician can't tell you a lot about viral infections beyond what you can learn in 30 minutes on Wikipedia. And that's miles away from being able to actually judge vaccines, or the usefulness of masks. What they typically do is rely on experts that write guidelines and recommendations.
Many people spent much, much more than 30 minutes thinking about Covid by now. Many have been in lockdown for over a year now. Every newspaper article they see, every TV show they see, every discussion people have is about Covid.
Even the experts did not have more than a year to thik about Covid yet.
Also people don't have to understand everything. I don't understand enough about mRNA to give you a medical explanation of the vaccine, but I can perhaps understand statistics of the outcomes of the vaccination.
For vaccines and masks, they should provide statistics that show they are effective. If they don't have them, they should launch studies to provide the data.
And even having independent experts be able to validate the claims by the authorities would be valuable.
I'm glad we got vaccines out so quickly, but I can see why some people ask about their safety as it never happened so quickly in the past and mRNA at such a large scale is unheard of.
Unfortunately, the anti-vax crowd will use any means necessary to discredit vaccines, and scepticism is part of their toolkit.
It's not just skeptism: I didn't like the ,,1 and half dose'' and other bullshit that AstraZeneca did in their Phase 3 to not have proper testing on old people. There is a reason why the data was not good enough for the FDA to approve it, it seemed like the AstraZeneca Phase 3 testing was rushed and on a level that would be unacceptable if there wasn't a pandemic.
Even in their announcements AstraZeneca seems like trying to hide the problems instead of giving a balanced view of the (probably small) risks.
> it seemed like the AstraZeneca Phase 3 testing was rushed and on a level that would be unacceptable if there wasn't a pandemic
I didn't like the lack of data on the older populations, either, and totally get why various regulators decided they wanted more such before going forward with it (given that the AZ one is based on known vaccine tech I'd have trusted it anyway, but that's a personal choice).
However the lack of data in the older population was not due to rushing (though it was rushed, obviously). They started pretty early on before much was known about the medical aspects of Covid-19 and took the deliberate decision not to risk people with age-reduced immune systems at the start.
Yes, that wasn't helpful, but you could also argue it was pretty good ethically and morally so it's hard really to fault them for it.
That's totally fine, but they could have finished the Phase-3 testing for old people, or at least offer alternative vaccines if the measured immune reaction is too small.
Right now my parents are opting waiting 1-2 months more for the Pfizer/Moderna vaccines, because after they decide on a vaccine, even if the antigen count in their blood is small, it doesn't give them the right for another vaccine (in UAE the government provides a 3rd dose of Sinopharm for people with small immune response).
Doctors in the EU are obliged to educate the patient on the risks and benefits of vaccines. It's not unheard of that they don't, but it is our right as patients to know the basic information about any vaccine we are being administered. Sometimes there are multiple options which can be evaluated.
Don't preach about how we should accept anything that's thrown our way. Many of us are in a tough situation so we'll accept the crappy AZ, but if such a vaccine were released on the market and had to compete with the likes of Pfizer nobody would pick it.
This is horrible. There is no difference between the AZ vaccine and Pfizer. One is not "crappy" - you're literally posting this on a thread that says it's safe and effective in multiple studies.
The EU is becoming a disaster zone of vaccine propaganda. I would never have imagined that national governments would become the primary source of anti-vax nonsense. Make no mistake about it - European politicians have been attacking the AZ vaccine because it originates from the UK and they are ideologically blinded by hatred of Brexit. They've been systematically lying about this particular vaccine and no other one right from the start.
They claimed it didn't work: false, based on a "misreading" of a German report. They claimed the UK had blocked export of it: false. They claimed AZ was in contract violation: false. They claimed it was dangerous: false.
Every time one lie is dispelled, another immediately emerges to take its place. And it's coming from people like Merkel and Macron. Unreal.
> European politicians have been attacking the AZ vaccine because it originates from the UK and they are ideologically blinded by hatred of Brexit.
There was a good piece in the Irish Times this weekend if you fancy a less UK-centric view on this. The view you've expressed above seems to be the only one I read among the British press/commentariat. Perhaps it is the UK that is blinded?
"The Oxford/AstraZeneca team managed an extraordinary feat – producing a safe and effective vaccine against a novel coronavirus within a few months. Yet time and again, AstraZeneca has undermined its own efforts with communication blunders, a lack of transparency and a consistent record of overestimating its own capacity to deliver."
Well, we know what the EU press are claiming, but that quoted paragraph isn't true is it? How has AZ undermined its own efforts? Where are the communication problems or lack of transparency? They have been doing pretty clear press releases where they address whatever the latest nonsense de jour is. For example, their response to the claims the vaccine was dangerous was very clear and unambiguous. The confusion here has been generated exclusively by one side.
As for the contract, the Commission released that contract specifically redacted to try and imply it said things it didn't, but they redacted it wrongly. Note that the EU committed itself to secrecy about their agreements as part of negotiating a lower price than other countries are paying. Then a Belgian minister violated that agreement too by publishing the prices. So it's hard to criticise AZ for lack of transparency when no company publishes customer contracts proactively and the EU itself has tried to hide the details of its own agreement as part of misleading the public. We know that the Commission was lying about things partly because they keep accidentally releasing information they intended to be kept secret.
The fact is, the EU has been taking measures and making statements here that are UK specific. When it declared it would require vaccine export licenses it exempted every neighbouring state, except the UK. When it suspended the Northern Ireland protocol over vaccines, it was a UK specific move. Now they are threatening to seize factories and block exports of already paid for vaccines, to the UK. If there's some explanation for this that isn't political it's not obvious what it is, because AZ has done nothing wrong, and nor has the UK.
> The view you've expressed above seems to be the only one I read among the British press/commentariat.
I'm from Germany, and that has been pretty much my impression as well. Merkel gave vaccine orders as a PR gift to von der Leyen/EU, they messed up badly. While that came out piece by piece, surprise surprise, in came the "mistakes".
I'm sure it's not a large conspiracy, at some point there's enough FUD spread everywhere that everyone's threshold for "pause the campaign" is low enough, "just to be safe", but some parts of it very much did look like revenge.
Your whole argument is undermined by the massive orders the EU put for this vaccine and how it was and is fighting to get those orders delivered in spite of all the screw-ups by AZ. Seriously, how do you come up with these conspiracy theories about Brexit hatred and then write with a straight face about "propaganda"?
What screwups by AZ? There haven't been any, they've been doing the same things as other pharma firms, who have all always said that manufacturing is unpredictable and they'll try to make it all as quickly as possible but can't offer hard guarantees. The idea they're incompetent is more media propaganda - exactly the kind of thing that's causing people to stop taking it in EU states. Probably the Commission should try and fix the large stockpiles going unused due to this type of propaganda before they worry about export bans.
As for Brexit, see my other comment. A lot of the actions the EU has taken have been entirely UK specific. For instance the requirement for export licenses was waived for every non-EU state neighbouring the EU, except the UK.
The meme of "not enough people want to take AZ" needs to die. It's not backed by any reality on the ground, if you have the stuff its not difficult to find people to take it.
Where did you get that idea? This is not a meme, it's repeats of widely available data and news reports. As of the 17th March nearly half of all delivered vaccines had not been used:
Germany alone was sitting on over 1 million. The article has a graph showing the backlog in each country. I am very skeptical they have managed to clear this in only 6 days given that around half the European population now incorrectly believes this vaccine is dangerous or useless.
That there aren't enough people that want the vaccine is a meme. There's lots and lots of people waiting for a chance to get it. Number of willing people is not a limiting factor, and won't be for a long time. And it's effing insulting to hear people parrot "Oh Germans don't want to be vaccinated" when at the same time nearly everyone around you is struggling to get an appointment for elderly/vulnerable relatives and would jump at a chance to get it themselves but will have to wait months to even be considered.
(and re numbers, since the 17th Germany has administered 1.2 million vaccinations, "unused" vaccinations can be reserved second doses, ... I certainly won't claim that this is all running perfectly, but any suggestion that more vaccine available wouldn't be used just doesn't make any sense)
OK, so I get that the data doesn't seem to match your local perception. That's useful to know, thanks.
But the suggestion that more available!=more use does make logical sense given the information available. Lots of vaccines have been stockpiled and more than ~50% of people in Germany/France are telling pollsters that they think the AZ vaccine is dangerous. The link between those two facts is obvious, one would automatically lead to the other. If those stockpiles are reserved for second doses then (a) Germany should adopt the same dosing strategy as the UK, which has by now been proven to work well and (b) they should just say that because it would change the politics of the situation considerably. Currently British politicians are saying outright that it makes no sense for the EU to threaten to block exports when they aren't using what they've got. If that's a misunderstanding it's easy to fix, but I haven't seen any such suggestion before and your phrasing (can be) suggests that this is speculation on your part, not a known fact.
No, one fact does not lead automatically to the other, since we are far from covering half the population. For a good chunk of people answering these polls the question is entirely academic for now, because nobody is offering the vaccine to them (which I assume skews the results, but even we assume it doesn't). If there were a severe lack of people willing to get vaccinated, people wouldn't have difficulties getting appointments. And that part of the population is also running out of patience, and has had it with excuses why we get less than promised. Don't underestimate that other large chunk of society. This is generally a thing: the people that stuck to all the rules + more and (perceive it as) getting nothing for it, while politics/media/... keeps pandering to those calling for less restrictions or even going total denial, are also very much not happy.
It's also clearly stated publicly that at least a million doses are currently being "stockpiled" to get the rollout through local doctors running (i.e. each doctor actually gets a whole 20 doses they can give to patients on the date this is supposed to be the case, nobody wanted the political drama of not giving some doctors the option or having even smaller numbers - and hopefully there is enough further supply to keep at least that rate going per week. The doctors bit is seen as even more important now more people are worried, since especially for the elderly it's assumed talking to their familiar doctor works better to calm those fears than formal invites to a center somewhere).
Similarly, while the reserving second doses has been debated a lot, it's the publicly announced policy (I don't have the exact stats on hand what percentage that is, it was in one of the many dashboards...) and the back-and-forth of who will deliver how much when doesn't exactly makes a change away from that attractive (because if you do change that, deliveries get cut again and suddenly you need to either not give someone a second dose on schedule or take someones appointment for the first away, you will get the blame however much sense it makes overall to accept that risk.).
Again, I'm fully admitting this has not been and is not going as smoothly as it could, but the "it's not needed" narrative is just BS. It makes a nice simple narrative, but that's about it, and ignorance is the most positive interpretation why people might peddle it.
> Many of us are in a tough situation so we'll accept the crappy AZ
The AZ is pretty much equal (at least) in effectiveness to the other vaccines. This is agreed by the UK regulators (and until Brexit the UK were considered expert enough to run the EU one), the EU regulators, the German regulators, etc, and now the US regulators (not yet approved, I know, but their opinion is now released). How many of these world-reknowned establishments need to say the same thing before you get it?
By saying "crappy AZ" your choice of words is a major part of the problem. You are part of the problem.
As for "competing with the likes of Pfizer", I have the greatest respect for the science behind Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and all the others - but with equal performance, at normal temperatures, at a fraction of the cost of the others, and with sub-licensed manufacturing around the world, the AZ vaccine is currently aiming to be the one that 90% of the global population will be relying on.
The "crappy" Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is by a long way the world's best hope (in medical terms). It's very gracious of you to "accept the crappy AZ" (talk about ungrateful) - but if you're willing to take the benefit the least you could do is stop undermining it by posting rubbish on a thread discussing the very story that contradicts you.
In an alternative universe, where we only had AZ maybe it would be considered awesome, but in our dimension, we have vaccines which offer better protection and fewer side-effects than AZ.
AZ's always been clouded in controversy from the botched trials, to the reduced effectiveness against variants up to the significant discomfort after vaccination in a non-negligible amount of people. And then there was the rare form of thrombosis, which is not 100% elucidated yet.
Why would anyone with a choice want AZ when there's Pfizer? And this is exactly what was happening all over Europe, but also in the US and Israel - people choose Pfizer in spite of the costs and complicated distribution.
It's particularly telling that the US prefers keeping tens of millions of doses of the super-awesome AZ on ice and continues with Pfizer.
Better protection just isn't true. The figures are not only within a few percent in most studies, but in some studies AZ is ahead. This is all about stats, and those will vary depending upon the sample size and population.
Side-effects? Fair enough. But so what? Most medication has side effects. Incidentally the US CDC says that with the Pfizer one "77.4% reported at least one systemic reaction" and "fatigue, headache and new or worsened muscle pain were most common". This isn't to say AZ may not have higher incidence, but to point out that it doesn't matter which you choose there may still be side-effects, and anecdotes about AZ are faster to spread due to the unwarranted distrust.
The controversy AZ has been clouded in has mostly been politically motivated, AZ miscommunications, natural issues with vaccine yields, or plain wrong. Apart from the rare blood issue, most of it has been either not genuine or irrelevant. Even for the blood issue there are more regulators, governments, and doctors who say it is not a statistical issue than there are who do. It's all about the optics though.
People should not be turning down an AZ vaccine to wait potentially months for a different vaccine (which will still have it's own side effects even if lower). A day or two of side effects vs an extra few months protection is a no-brainer.
People choose Pfizer (which I am not knocking; I'd gladly have it if offered) based on what they read - and the press war is being won by AZ detractors despite the number of times they are wrong (eg Macron saying quasi-inneffective for older people and then France only wanting to use it for older people, or the UK choosing to wait longer than a couple of weeks between doses, being called terrible and irresponsible, but now even the WHO says that improves protection).
As for the US keeping doses on ice, that's not "particularly telling" at all. It isn't approved for use there yet. And they aren't in a hurry as they have enough of the other vaccines. Plus, they are 'loaning' millions of AZ vaccine doses to Mexico and Canada which they wouldn't do unless they thought it was pretty safe (as their FDC has already publicly said it is).
Pfizer seems to be a great vaccine. But so is AstraZeneca and continual unwarranted attacks risks destroying trust in a vaccine (AZ) which is being produced at cost in over a dozen countries and is intended to form up to 90% of the world's protection.
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To risk being overly melodramatic, unlike their counterparts (and admittedly at the prompting of the UK government and Oxford University) AstraZeneca producing billions of doses (the plan) at cost in multiple countries using local production is actually the rare example of a drug company almost literally saving the world without profiteering whilst they do it. They should be applauded, not continually attacked.
In the same way (and I don't like saying this as I believe in the EU and voted remain in the British referendum) the EU attacks the UK for not sharing, when the British government co-funded vaccine development at a British university and ensured a British/Swedish partner providing at-cost production for the world, whilst the EU haggled about prices.
> the feeling I got from Italy wasn't so much "see! vaccines are dangerous! I am not getting a jab!, but rather "it looks like AstraZeneca may not be entirely safe, I demand a Moderna or Pfizer jab!"
N=1, but example from my own family circles is: "See! Vaccines are dangerous! If AstraZeneca was safe, half of the world wouldn't be putting it on hold! I'm not going to take it, and don't talk to me about Pfizer and Moderna - I don't want an mRNA vaccine, they're too new technology, who knows what their side effects are. If I really, really have to take a vaccine, I'll wait for Johnson & Johnson."
Which, of course, is almost entirely unavailable here (Poland).
Another big reason why the vaccine orders were delayed in the EU was that many governments were unconvinced about mRNA vaccines and wanted a classical vaccine. So your family's in good company there.
They're also right that we don't know what the side-effects are. We're reasonably sure that there are no long-term damaging effects and know that the current crisis justifies the risk of using this new form of vaccine.
> Another big reason why the vaccine orders were delayed in the EU was that many governments were unconvinced about mRNA vaccines and wanted a classical vaccine.
Which is a weird stance in my opinion. Even if you're skeptical about safety and effectiveness, not ordering them as soon as they're available makes little sense. Yes, it costs money, but significantly less than locking down for a week or two.
It felt a bit like "let's not invest in a backup system yet, we don't know whether we'll need it".
I think price + unproven was a big concern for the less wealthy countries.
One has to keep in mind with the EU that we tried our best to avoid splitting the continent into winners and losers based on which countries were the wealthiest. Unfortunately we ended up being on the losing side together, but the driving idea wasn't wrong. :-)
It was also not wrong to want to do a complete instead of emergency certification of the vaccine or pressing e.g. Pfizer to take responsibility for unwanted side-effects. Other countries risked more and it seems that they were favoured by fortune.
friendly reminder that this is factually false. vaccines can and do cause harm all the time. there is danger in getting all medicine, and more danger in rushed medicines with potential unstudied long-term side effects.
thats not to say that the history of vaccine use isnt overwhelmingly net positive, with the net-positive per cost metric being somehow even higher, but the fastest way to discredit yourself is to ignore the obviously valid and true points of your opponent, even if their overarching thesis is wrong.
The anti-vax crowd is complete nonsense. Regardless of any actual side-effects or concerns about the actual medicine and science of vaccines, the anti-vax crowd is still conspiracy theory nonsense. They don't go at it rationally, and no discourse is possible with them.
I believe it's not possible precisely because the underlying mentality is one of "they are lying to us". So you debunk the meme of the day and the next meme is waiting for you tomorrow, repeated by the same people.
You gain nothing by debunking today's meme. No lesson will be learned because the problem is not one that can be solved by reasoning. No general conclusions are drawn. It's tiresome and futile, and ultimately the anti-vaxxer crowd just "wants to believe"... in conspiracies.
I find it's also not always as easy as you put it to debunk crap. It requires time, effort, digging up numbers, comparing statistics, etc, whereas making shit up takes almost no effort.
In this case, the authorities actually are lying to people about vaccines, just in the opposite direction than the one than usually hypothesised (i.e. claiming it's dangerous and useless when in fact it's safe and effective).
This fact - and it is undeniable, heavily documented fact by this point - unfortunately will make anti-vax theories far more prevalent and influential in the coming years. The way that EU governments and "experts" are willing to lie at every level about vaccine safety is by now completely established. Simply watching national governments disagreeing with the EMA, with the outcomes of US trials, suspending then resuming vaccines etc demonstrates this beyond doubt. The trustworthiness of expertise and the authorities is often the primary argument against anti-vaxxers and that argument is now on fire. New arguments need to be found, but what? How can trust be recovered after this?
You trust your government and medial institutions, fine. My government has been caught lying over and over “for the public good” during this pandemic, but also on topics like feminism. We know they would lie again without an afterthought like they have in the past, for example giving AIDS to people through blood transfusion (4000 victims because they didn’t want to be seen doubting) or Chernobyl (“Don’t worry, the cloud didn’t reach France” - It did), or bombing the Greenpeace boat with people inside in NZ, or giving 6 diplomatic passports to Benalla and when he was caught beating up political opponents for the service of the king, “seize his passport”... but not seizing the remaining 5 of them.
You may live in a democracy, but we don’t. We literally have laws that the press isn’t free to talk during the pandemic.
People don’t trust doctors and politicians, simply because they have been shown several times to not be trustworthy. The only remedy is not to take more or less precaution; the only remedy is to start being trustworthy, having open science, having a talk about the risks, and not trying to slander or sue people who have opinions that are not approved by the nomenklatura.
As a reminder, the Ordre des Médecins has sued Dr Raoult for “violating fraternity”. The rest of the accusations I’m not a doctor, but “violating fraternity”? Is that science we are talking about, does physics include “follow whatever the group says”?
In the end, as long as you believe it is a thing to “lie for the public good”, it is good to trust absolutely no figure we are given and doubt about every single thing you say.
> My government has been caught lying over and over “for the public good” during this pandemic, but also on topics like feminism.
I'm not familiar with what's been going in your country (France?), but I'd suggest some heavy citations to back up a lightning-rod statement like the above. It's particularly surprising from a country with a pretty good international reputation for press freedom. Were these "feminist lies" arguably innocent innumeracy / failing to perform multivariate regression?
> You need a citation for government lying to people?
When someone mixes in a vague accusation about the government lying for the benefit of a protected group, without citations, it's a bit of a warning sign. I totally believe governments lie, but citations always help credibility.
By the latter are you referring to the pay gap myth? If so it's well beyond innocent innumeracy because feminists have been doing univariate "analysis" to make false claims of pay discrimination since the 1980s, and people have been pointing out the need to do multivariate analysis for just as long. It doesn't make any difference, they still make exactly the same claims in exactly the same way no matter how often it gets debunked.
My best wild guess is that the GP is referring to univariate pay gap studies, but I'd like to do better than a wild guess.
My wife is in finance and accounting, and has a good friend who is a serial entrepreneur with several small businesses, employing a few more women than men. After one of these univariate statistics was quoted on the news, my wife (who professionally thinks about cost savings all day) asked me a question that boiled down to "Hey... it would be wrong and sexist of course... but could my friend save 5-10% on salaries by hiring nearly exclusively top-notch women?" That's when I explained univariate and multivariate regression, and why she should always be skeptical about any study that doesn't assign weights to multiple plausible factors.
There are still plenty of smart people out there who haven't heard about the flaws in some of these studies. Unfortunately, it's much easier to fit a narrative to an oversimplified problem with a simplistic solution. If only mean income were a good proxy for how effectively society helps people achieve fulfillment and life goals, fair governance would be much easier. Don't get me wrong. I believe governments should do more to help reduce constraints on women that impede their life goals and fulfillment, but it looks like mean hourly income isn't a great proxy for measuring progress in fulfillment.
Your wife is one thing and understandable because she's (presumably) not a full time feminist advocate. But I still routinely see this claim be made by e.g. journalists who have been writing about feminism their entire careers, or people who appear to be spending most of their time on such advocacy. Those people either know, or they are so dumb they never had the obvious thought that occurred immediately to your wife. I don't think they're dumb as they're normally quite eloquent, they just don't want to lose that powerful talking point.
> My government has been caught lying over and over “for the public good” during this pandemic
All governments do it. It's just that some are so good at lying that a large part of the naive population actually believe that the government is doing things for their own good. People generally have been indoctrinated when they are very young in schools.
>You may live in a democracy, but we don’t.
This is also true the world over. Elections in 'democracies' are a sham. Notice the people who get elected, they are often the same group of elites. A 'democratic' society is one where the dictators have mastered the art of a bloodless coup. A vote gives your average Joe citizen the illusion of have a say when in reality has little or none.
In the end what generally makes a better society is generally overall 'better' citizens. (however one may define 'better')
> or Chernobyl (“Don’t worry, the cloud didn’t reach France” - It did),
This is a huge urban legend, which has been thoroughly debunked.
I'm not in the mood to look for sources, but the gist is that the "clouds stopped at the borders" meme came from a few specific TV reports that were extremely misinterpreted, not from any sort of official communication.
> My government has been caught lying over and over “for the public good” [...]
I just see decades old, one time events completely unrelated to the current government.
> We literally have laws that the press isn’t free to talk during the pandemic.
[citation needed]
> People don’t trust doctors and politicians, simply because they have been shown several times to not be trustworthy.
French people don't trust doctors because France in one of the leading countries in homeopathy, osteopathy and various quackery spending. Half of the typical pharmacy's stock is a healthcare scam. French are also the top antivax population in the west. [0] So it's hardly surprising that the average Frenchman's perception of what a sound healthcare policy looks like is absolute bonkers.
French people not trusting doctors is not a consequence of bad medical practice, but a symptom of something else. After all, French healthcare routinely ranks in the top 10 in the world, and often top 1 [1].
Then Macron arrives and removes homeopathy from the social security reimbursement program because it lacks any demonstrated effectivity and loads of French people complain. [2]
The government is far from being perfect, but in this particular topic, I'll side with it, thanks.
> The only remedy is not to take more or less precaution; the only remedy is to start being trustworthy, having open science, having a talk about the risks, and not trying to slander or sue people who have opinions that are not approved by the nomenklatura. As a reminder, the Ordre des Médecins has sued Dr Raoult for “violating fraternity”. The rest of the accusations I’m not a doctor, but “violating fraternity”? Is that science we are talking about, does physics include “follow whatever the group says”?
Since his rise to fame, Raoult has been charging 1264 € per consultation, many of those for prescribing a hydroxychloroquine treatment [3]. C'est quoi ça, conventionné secteur arnaque ? Excuse my literal French but the parent knows what I'm talking about. Those rates are roughly 15 times what a well-rated specialist would charge after decades of practice.
That's leaving aside that his hydroxychloroquine fixation is unawarded as it's been shown again and again that its benefits, if any, are very small.[4]
Raoult has been doing a pump-and-dump of his medical career to retire comfortably, and he's masterfully catered the contrarian sector of the French population to do so. It's textbook medical malpractice. The damage caused by him is to be picked up by his colleagues, so, yeah, that's "violation de la fraternité".
> Now being extra careful is criticized as undermining trust in vaccines?
Some people certainly see it that way, but it seems to me like it's the perfect way to regain trust exactly by demonstrating an extreme sensitivity to actual issues.
Besides, something I don't get: Doesn't vaccine demand still way outstrip supply? Should that be the case, "skeptics" and whatever shouldn't matter for now, should they? Neither would stopping vaccination for a moment since we're already running on tiny buffers because we have gigantic vaccination capacity, right?
Why not let the early adopters get it to demonstrate safety and just get it out to the people? There are early & late adopters with any technology and as something spreads organically you will also have a ton of "Oh, my friend got it and they're fine!" moments.
It's the vaccine bans that are bad. Careful review is not. When your government doesn't let you take something you want, it's a ban we just aren't using the word.
This one was particularly eggregious, because even if the side effect was caused by AZ (unlikely but possible), it would still make sense to take the vaccine.
But giving people a choice is the important thing, particularly in a situation where risk profiles vary so widely. Using pessimistic assumptions and data we knew in July 2020 it made sense to lift the ban, let alone now.
The whole argument is based on a false dichotomy between having the vaccine or not having the vaccine. When really it is a choice between have vaccine (possible side effects) or get covid (definite well documented effects). They should explain the decisions in those terms.
I assure you that if those that resign from AZ would take a jab with Pfizer or Moderna. But in e.g. Poland they can't because those more pricey vaccines are reserved form >= 70 year olds.
This is an incredibly important lesson in public communications.
'The Crowd' is dumb, even if it's made up of mostly smart people.
'Fact' and 'Communications' are completely different things.
FYI it's one of the reasons for cancel culture as well. Most people are not offended, or at least might understand a situation given context. But in a flurry of hype, all of that gets lost.
This is multiplied by social media.
This is why people occupying positions of integrity i.e. Doctors, Presidents's of Countries have a double responsibility to the Truth to the point where it should be legislated.
That said - we always need to support legitimate contrarians - but it needs to be based on fact, not hyperbole.
There are some lunatic anti-vaxx doctors on TikTok and I'm really not comfortable with it. 'Free Speech' to disseminate absolute lies is literally costing lives.
The anti vaxx crowd is already against it anyway. The way Europe is treating AZ does mean generally pro-vaxx people become sceptical as well. And I see that effect in Germany as well.
On the other hand, the one message you don't want to get out is "we decided not to pause vaccinations because we were afraid of what it would do to the vaccine's image" - and if there were deliberations to that effect, that will get out.
Transparency can be painful in the short run, but in the longer run I feel like it's often the better option.
Ironically, if you don't want to undermine the vaccine's image, the message should be that you don't care about the vaccine's image. People should think the decision to stop or continue is made for scientific or bureaucratic reasons, not because the vaccine is dangerous or you are hiding something.
No matter what you do, this is the news they'll get from Russia. So the only reasonable strategy is to handle that as a separate and independent issue (combatting fake news from Russia) that shouldn't affect your vaccination strategy or other strategies.
I haven't seen any decent effort to explain to the regular public the scale of risks of anything.
Yet it seems very possible. For example, each person could have presented to them a personal "health card", which showed to them what might happen to them in the next 10 years. It would have on it "Dies from Heart disease", "Covid", "run over by bus", "still living and healthy". Each would have area scaled by likelihood.
Then they could be given another identical health card showing how their health outcomes would change with a vaccine.
Upon seeing "Oh, I have more chance of being healthy in 10 years if I take this vaccine", they'd be much more likely to sign up. Likewise, after a cancer diagnosis, they can be given a new card with "dies of cancer" now being a massive area, and they can readjust their priorities.
I think the trick is the cards must be customized for everyone, taking into account personal risk factors (age, do they smoke, how obese, past health issues, etc.) An entire government department could have as their job reading papers and coming up with a method to produce the cards as accurately as possible.
Strange take. Bulgaria has a skeptical and misinformed population so you blame the Danish health authorities for
taking a decision coherent with their mission, i.e., to protect Danish citizens?
I don't think a national health authority has to think about these things at all, honestly. I would distrust my local agency if I knew they didn't pause vaccinations that they thought should be paused in order not to affect the vaccine's public image. The problem lies elsewhere.
Blame? On the contrary, he went the extra mile to explain why it was the right decision for Denmark, but mindlessly copying it was NOT the right decision for Bulgaria, and people died because of it. Acting like our govt did is a very Bulgarian thing, we even have a saying for it -- "The frog saw they're shoeing the horse and raised her foot."
I can’t square that line of reasoning with the inclusion of the last paragraph, which reads as if they’re blaming Denmark:
> I really wish richer nations would think more globally before they rush to such decisions. Thousands of people will die in poorer nations due to the delays it causes.
What if they pause vaccinations they don't think should be paused on medical grounds, in order not to affect the vaccine's public image? That seems to be what's happening now.
This makes zero sense to me from a stats point of view.
Denmark has only had 11 deaths in total in the age bracket [0-60], without known underlying conditions. Most of them close to sixty and overweight.
4 [0-60] bracket women have already died in Norway, and 2 in Denmark with one 30 year old in intensive care. All healthy relatively young health workers, a group of people that have simply not died from Covid.
Norway has zero deaths below 60 without underlying conditions, and 4 deaths from the vaccine. So it's only the vaccine killing healthy people. Same in Denmark. You won't find a single dead healthy 50 yr woman among the dead.
All the data is publically available. It's almost incomprehensible to me that people don't understand that Covid almost exlusively kills 80+ people, or with many comorbidities.
Close to zero healthy people below 60 have died from Covid in the west.
Sacrificing 4 healthy people after only 120K vaccinations in NO is crazy. Or 2 after 140K in Denmark with one in critical.
I wouldn't take the AZ vaccine. There is about a in 1 / 25000 of sudden death for a healthy|<60 person compared to zero with Covid at the moment.
1 / 25000 chance of dying is crazy high for a 30 year old, and here we haven't even counted non fatal haemorrhages which is higher.
1: 7.86% of all deaths in the UK were under 60 [1]. Unfortunately, I don't see any data on comorbidities easily available, but I'd expect similar rates of them in the UK vs NO, DK, etc. and so I'd expect similar rates of death in the agre groups. Note that I don't doubt your general point that covid is vastly more deadly to the elderly, but I do not believe 1 in 13 supports your statement that "close to zero healthy people below 60 have died from Covid in the west".
2: Considering deaths alone is a woefully inadequate measure of the impact of covid on people. There's countless reports of ongoing issues [2] after 'recovery', and we have absolutely no idea what the long-term implications are. By letting it pass through populations with a low mortality rate, you're gambling against possible long-term health implications that will impact whole populations on an ongoing basis.
3: I am not sure how your 1 in 25,000 rate of sudden death matches with the fact that England has vaccinated 6,169,566 people under 55 [3] as of 14/03. Your rate would imply we'd have seen close to 250 sudden deaths out of England alone. A cursory search doesn't find me any numbers, so please point me towards any you may have, but I would be astounded if news media weren't reporting on that sort of rate of deaths.
I'm not going to pass judgement either way on the equations of how many vaccine-related deaths are comparable to 'natural' covid deaths or long-term illnesses, however I felt those three points were worth making, particualrly given they affect fundamental assumptions you make, or data you cite.
It gives details of patients admitted to ICUs, and the patient characteristics gives numbers of people who needed no support in day to day activities, or needed some assistance, or needed full assistance.
That's not quite co-morbidity, because people with asthma or high blood pressure or obesity will often need no assistance.
I had not, thank you. Being from Australia, my main exposure to data is one that tells a major success story with thankfully very few data points for deaths. I intentionally avoided citing the Aussie data for that reason (indeed, I started using it then swapped to UK data becuase 900 fatalities total is not really a broad sample size for understanding mortality rate < 60), but it then meant I was trying to find data I wasn't sure existed, on sites with which I'm unfamiliar.
As a moderate chronic asthmatic, it's been interesting to see that it is not a co-morbidity as people first assumed. I've also struggled to find good data on it, so this will make for interesting reading. I appreciate you sharing it!
Regarding your third point, you are baking in an assumption that the UK AZ vaccine is the same as the EU vaccine, but they made in different facilities.
There could be a manufacturing issue that causes this. There could be a genetic issue that causes this. There could be a drug interaction issue that causes this. There could be an issue with how the doses are being injected.
Or it could be a total coincidence and these issues were caused by something else.
Regarding your first point, the chances of dying from COVID in the USA if you are under 20 are like 1/100,000 if you have no pre-existing conditions. All people under 40 is probably higher than that, but I wouldn't take that AZ shot if there was a 1/25,000 shot of dropping dead. I certainly wouldn't give it my children. I'm not saying those are the odds of dropping dead from the AZ shot, but if they were, its not worth it for younger people.
All of you points are reasonable, but less so considering we can wait a few weeks and eliminate the risk with another vaccine like Pfizer/Biontech.
As the other posters of sources show, this is a very rare kind blod failure that only hits 1/3000000 people, and often leads to death. Not just a little blod clots.
German research says 7 times the amount of blod clots in AZ vaccinated already against background:
Comorbidities is about 90% in DK for deaths, this is pretty much the pattern everywhere.
In other words only about 10% percent die without "known" comorbidities - but very importantly obesity is excluded here often - it's relatively rare to find in-shape healthy "younger" people dying - that's why it becomes sensational.
I only have comorbidity sources in danish (unstrained system), but to compare to the UK this is the pattern seen in "strained" public health system - from after the NY first wave meltdown[2]. Notice how few without comorbidities. Only 17 in the age group 18-44, in 15000 deaths.
Today the NYC numbers have doubled so lets extrapolate and say 34 people have died in the age group 18-44. If 3/4 of those where obese which is pretty likely[3], then we end up with about 9 deaths out of 50000 in the 18-44 bracket in NYC, a heavily strained city with 8.5 million inhabitants.
Not zero, but seriously bordering on it noise and scale wise.
2)
Considering above ratios 4 deaths per 150.000 in the 0-60 bracket, and problems with non fatal haemorrhages that often leaves people completely handicapped still seems worse in a "semi experimental" vaccine without large scale testing yet. Again 4 healthy people have already died, two in their thirties in Norway. That just doesn't happen statistically with DIC haemorrhages.
3) The main theory is bad batches, or bad laboratories. The UK makes its AZ vaccines in completely different labs than the rest of Europe. Could also be genes, diet, local medications etc.
No matter what - the "lets just divide the NO/DK/DE" high death rates into the succesfull UK vaccinations is extremely dishonest. Right now the numbers look bad in both Norway, Denmark and Germany this is why there is already several specialists that are alarmed independently in NO/DE (see first sciencemag article).
-- disclaimer, i am not against vaccines, and would gladly take the Pfizer vaccine at the moment at least. Also seems to have way less side effects after vaccination like fever/shaking/headache/vomiting. Everyone i know who's taken the AZ vaccine has been very sick for a few days (nurses/doctors), no side effects from the pfizer vaccine - anecdotally i know.
Thank you for the comprehensive response. All of your points are fair and I like your logic.
Particularly, you make a good point regarding differing manufacturing locations and possible batch issues. I did not consider that. It wasn't my intention to be dishonest, but I agree that it was flawed logic to think ti would necessarily apply.
What it does highlight, though, is that it's reasonable to consider this particular batch/source of the AZ vaccine to be risky, but I think then it's important to then stress that "The AZ Vaccine" in general temrs is not automatically undermined by this, since evidence clearly demonstrates that other locations have used it successfully without this issue. To me, this is an important distinction to draw since without it, public confidence in the AZ vaccine as a whole is undermined.
Public rejection of vaccines other than Pfizer & Moderna is a particular concern of mine, as I believe the Pfizer & Moderna vaccines have a much higher barrier to manufacture, so there's much less ability to scale them in the short-to-medium term. As far as I'm concerned, we need vaccines such as from AZ, J&J, etc. to be able to produce vaccines at the scale necessary to move from only vaccinating the elderly in 1st world countries, to vaccinating 7+ billion across the entire globe.
As an aside, I really appreciate that this discussion was fact-based, respectful and open-minded. It's an incredibly refreshing change compared to the overwhelming majority of other vaccine-related discussions I endure! Thank you, to you and to the HN community in general for this quality of discourse.
All fair points, - i also appreciate the quality discussion!
Luckily a myriad of vaccines are on their way with differing technologies. As far as i know many of them "better" in various ways, so i hope we at some point are going to get something very robust, even for variations - but that also makes it so important to be extremely cautious in the meantime - as with the current AZ vaccine in the northern regions.
I don't know about Norway, but for Germany there have been preliminary results published, which indicate that the cerebral venous sinus thrombosis cases were indeed caused by immune reaction.
Not in the published, peer reviewed sense. But the group of doctors at Rikshospitalet, that treated some of these patients, is confident that the vaccine is the only plausible explanation.
Quoting from the somewhat poorly translated VG article:
>"We have the reason [for the blood clots]. And there is no other thing than the vaccine which can explain that we have this immune response, says Holme."
>"[...] we have no other history with these patients that could create such a severe immune response. I am confident that these antibodies is the reason, and I see no other reasons than it being the vaccine that triggers it"
Let's assume there is causality. So what? I have the impression people are just bow realizing that every drug comes with a piece of paper, that includes all known, and in a lot of cases potentially deadly, side effects. But nobody stops taking Asperin, paracetamol and other things.
All that was achieved by extensive media coverage of AZ was, that authorities and doctors are kind of obliged to announce every issue with it. And that these issues are just plain overblown. And again hyped by media.
That changes a lot of things. For one, this side effect was neither known nor documented, so people could not make an informed decision before getting the vaccine.
Then individuals have a quantifiable risk of dying from COVID vs. dying from the vaccine. Depending on age/sex/comorbidities/medication/etc. one of the other may be higher.
Also from a public health perspective, if these CVST cases are known to be mostly limited to a particular group (women under 50) and the vector vaccine, then this group could be vaccinated with other types like mRNA vaccines.
This is a few days old now so doesn't include the latest Norwegian cases, but that seemed to be the thinking (though the article feels a bit of a mix between certain and equivocal at different points).
You can not make any of these comparisons, Bulgaria is a very special country.
1-Prime minister is a thug and soon to assume dictators role.
2- Population is in HEAVY decline, unlike most places.
3- Most of the educated people emigrate abroad, and never return, in result the remaining population is mostly in "risk group" .. but it is not a group if its most.
4- 10% of the population (romes), do not count as Bulgarian and will not be vaccinated, so that is also a huge problem.
And most of these factors are due to culture/mentality problems, that stem from within.
So yeh. Bulgaria is not comparable to other countries
61% of people in France now think the AZ vaccine is unsafe, up 18 percentage points on February. 55% of Germans think the AZ jab is unsafe, up 15 points on February.
We can add Covid to the 'precautionary principle' victim list that already includes zero-carbon energy, and huge improvements in agricultural productivity.
> Hours after, Austria followed and many other EU nations.
Austria never followed. As far as I know one charge was discarded after a fatal clotting case in Austria in a nurse. The regulator also said that the risk of not vaccinating outweighs the risk of vaccinating.
Yep, around the same time the first, and completely wrong, article about AZ ineffectiveness came out in Germany. I have the impression that politicians wanted to save their behinds by sacrificing AZ and hoping things would solve themselves. Which they didn't, but now it's too late.
And in Poland they didn't stop vaccinating with AZ and it caused even more problems - at least 50% people are not going to their scheduled vaccination.
This issue would be solved by: allowing people to choose vaccine they want (according to our government officials "they are all the same") or/and allow younger crowds to vaccinate.
> I really wish richer nations would think more globally before they rush to such decisions.
The Danish government has no obligation to base its public health policy on what is optically best for Bulgaria. Every Danish person should be able to expect that their government will act in the best interest of Denmark.
For sure. After EU nations put the vaccine on hold, pretty much everyone in my circle of friends and family has decided to either not take this vaccine outright or is seriously considering not taking it. This is Canada.
I seriously doubt most countries are just blindly following Denmark. The much more likely reason is that this specific vaccine offers very little protection against the rapidly spreading South African variant.
part is the one that needs addressing and not the other countries killing confidence by sending mixed signals. In the end it’s an evolutionary process, the ones who are right will survive with a higher probability. Also I am not totally ruling out the posibillity that the sceptical ones might be right in the end.
Though I personally believe that it’s a no brainer to take the jab if you are above a certain age (50, 60 idk) or have other health issues.
That article is quite uninformed. There was no legal requirement either, it was a purely political decision, based on the advice of the Paul-Ehrlich-Institute (PEI).
The statistical anomality about the thrombosis cases was known before and not considered a reason to halt vaccination. Only when it became clear that these were CSVT combined with lowered platelet count (which is known to be caused by immune reaction), strongly suggesting a causal link, then the decision to halt vaccination was made, until the actual risk could be assessed.
India has two vaccines in circulation both based on inactivated virus and surprisingly there's no such fud spreading around these parts. Though the lines at vaccine centers are not long, I know many who have gotten it, including 85+ year olds with comorbidities who suffered one or two chills but that's about it.
Covishield is similar to Az/Ox vaccine and uses the AdV vector. Covaxin uses inactivated Cov2 viruses.
Long wait times in B'luru earlier this month. That said, I don't think the vaccine or the disease mean too much to Indians (due to all sorts of factors).
Wish the Govt. was looking at actual data and science rather than what their peers in other countries were doing. Looks like they'll be locking the country down and destroying parts of the economy that weren't destroyed by last year. Almost seems malicious at this point.
India and probably Brazil will suffer the most -long term- from Covid19 effect on worldwide trade and economic production. They are at the end of their demographic transition, and already had trouble cashing in (and cashing in is fundamental if you want to be a rich country).
In my tier-3 place it was surprisingly easy. My parents got a call asking them if they would like to get vaccinated, not even using the cowin app. The appointment was given after two days.
The first injection took an hour including the 30 min observation time.
I don’t think they will be locking. if i look in cowin for my pincode there are 500 slots free for vaccine tomorrow.
I don't think the government is going to lock the whole nation again. Maybe the state governments will lock the cities like Mumbai (which I don't think is a good idea) but other than that it is improbable that the national government will do anything again (atleast I hope so).
Just because your government didn't do the work, doesn't mean it falls to another to protect you. That is something you have to change at the ballot box.
in another Eastern European country a nurse that was administering the vaccine was telling people to go home and not get vaccinated with the AZN vaccine when they came in to get vaccinated :)))
>"Combatting malign influences in the Americas: OGA used diplomatic relations in the Americas
region to mitigate efforts by states, including Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia, who are working to
increase their influence in the region to the detriment of US safety and security. OGA coordinated
with other U.S. government agencies to strengthen diplomatic ties and offer technical and
humanitarian assistance to dissuade countries in the region from accepting aid from these illintentioned states. Examples include using OGA’s Health Attaché office to persuade Brazil to reject
the Russian COVID-19 vaccine, and offering CDC technical assistance in lieu of Panama accepting
an offer of Cuban doctors. "
This has nothing to do with phase 3 trials or it being rushed....
Yeah the stop was needless and only helped the anti-vaxxers. The chance is still much less than common medication like birth control and much smaller than Covid itself.
Anti-vaxxers shouldn't be pandered to, they should be sent to the back of the queue when the need for ICUs come.
So the AstraZeneca vaccine does seem to trigger thrombosis in very rare cases, caused by a strong immune response. But luckily:
> The German researchers say the good news is that if their theory is correct, this rare adverse reaction to the jab can be identified and treated.
> They say recipients should be on the lookout for unusual bruising, swelling or headaches that start four or more days after getting the vaccination. If identified quickly, they say, the clotting problem can be managed relatively easily by health professionals.
Indeed, the age group for cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) is very specific [1], mostly women < 55 (menopause?):
> The Committee’s experts looked in extreme detail at records of DIC and CVST reported from Member States, 9 of which resulted in death. Most of these occurred in people under 55 and the majority were women. Because these events are rare, and COVID-19 itself often causes blood clotting disorders in patients, it is difficult to estimate a background rate for these events in people who have not had the vaccine. However, based on pre-COVID figures it was calculated that less than 1 reported case of DIC might have been expected by 16 March among people under 50 within 14 days of receiving the vaccine, whereas 5 cases had been reported. Similarly, on average 1.35 cases of CVST might have been expected among this age group whereas by the same cut-off date there had been 12. A similar imbalance was not visible in the older population given the vaccine.
This seems to be yet another case where the news is incapable of keeping up with timely technical information. No mistakes were made, the pause could have gone either way and we should generally be more understanding of difficult but timely decisions made in the face of uncertainty.
IMHO the suspension was very sensible as well as the identification of a mitigation protocol. This is how medicine is supposed to work: no emotions or politicking about second-order effects on public perception and so on. Just the facts, analysis and conclusions.
Indeed, as with everything around this pandemic has been, the turnaround time has been breathtakingly fast. I'm curious what infrastructure or methodology is supporting such a radical pace?!
My understanding was that the rate was still lower than it is in the unvaccinated population; and while they conclude "only the vaccine could explain these cases", I wonder how many cases in the unvaccinated population are investigated this thoroughly.
> My understanding was that the rate was still lower than it is in the unvaccinated population
That was when it was thought to be a normal thrombosis. The one they identified then, was actually an extremely rare one "Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis":
> an estimated 3-4 cases per million annual incidence in adults
I love following quickly-developing stories like this, where the best knowledge available develops day by day.
You can be dead certain that a lot of the people who read the news at an early point in time, will go to their deaths believing that the initial quote was correct. It pays off to have a shifting degree of certainty about things like this.
That depends on the country. Norway had four cases of fatal blood clothing in young people which is significant considering only 9 people below 50 died of covid there.
>Holme led the work to find out why three health workers under the age of 50 were hospitalized with serious blood clots and low levels of blood platelets after having taken the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine. One of the health workers died on Monday.
Like me, GP might be confused, as two deaths from blood clots among five hospitalized for it were reported last week. Then yesterday, as mentioned in sibling's link, two more deaths were reported (as having happened on March 21). This is where the 4 figure is deduced from.
I don't know the source of this confusion; it might have disappeared in an editorial decision. But as reported in said link, it is certain that three are now dead and five have been hospitalized.
It would be interesting to know why Norway has had such a high incidence of this (presumed) deadly side effect, and why it hasn't been discovered in others.
For countries that have a low incidence of covid, a fatality rate like this among younger people makes it a tricky ethical decision, especially if other vaccines will soon be available. My money is on it either being explicitly pulled or sometimes becoming very unpopular in these countries.
It really depends what rate you're looking at.
It can be lower than normal when looking at the whole population that is vaccinated but high on a specific group of this population.
In this case, the fact that there might be complications specific to an specific age group and potential specific to women might be a hint that there's indeed a problem that was not seen. It does not mean that the vaccine is not safe, but it might be not safe in specific circumstances, like a lot of medications already are.
Just spitballing here, but it might be possible that these individuals have an immune system that is pre-disposed to an auto-immune attack on their platelets. If so it might have happened eventually anyway (hence no deviation from normal stats), but the vaccine happens to trigger it pretty consistently. If so, and if the thrombosis turns out to be treatable like the German researchers think, then getting the AZ vaccine might turn out to be a relatively safe, controlled way for people with the condition to find out that they have it (compared to something else triggering it at some random time where they are not on the lookout for symptoms, and thus more likely to die from the blood clots). All theoretical at this point, but it would be a pretty good outcome if this side effect of the vaccine in reality turns out to become a screening method for a previously unknown condition.
I received my first dose of AstraZeneca yesterday (I'm in Austria, and qualify as teaching staff). I had severe flu-like symptoms last night and today, to the point of having to cancel my classes. It's the worst my body has felt in several years. I don't recall receiving another vaccine in my life that was half as bad.
However of course I'll be the first to line up in three week's time to get my second shot.
I think a big problem in communication has been that people believe that in order to oppose the anti-vaxxers you need to create a narrative that the vaccine has no negative side effects at all - which isn't true, and thus gives the anti-vaxxers more fuel. It would have been much smarter to present the argument in favor of the vaccine as a cost-benefit analysis from the start. As harsh as it sounds, making everyone feel bad for a few days and possibly causing more severe effects in a small minority is much better than allowing the virus to continue spreading for another year. Not even close.
The question is why COVID vaccine is so harsh, and why is it different than a typical flu vaccine? People say the side effect is good it is your immune response, then why not having side effect is good as well? The more I read the more confused I am.
I am getting my second jab tomorrow. Vaccine is still far better than the virus itself.
> The question is why COVID vaccine is so harsh, and why is it different than a typical flu vaccine?
I had a pretty bad day after the second dose of Moderna - high fever, etc. Symptoms mostly dissipated after 24 hours of the shot.
I have my suspicions about why the COVID vaccines have tended to have more severe reactivity as compared to the flu vaccine - they were designed to trigger a very strong immune response & subsequent antibody titer, probably a lot more than might be required for protection in hindsight. The current crop of emergency use authorized vaccines have virtually 100% protection against severe COVID - which is great. My guess is that halving the antibody titer would have yielded something like 95% protection, and probably given you less reactivity as well. The manufacturers have erred on the side of caution, probably rightly so. By comparison the flu shot for last year's flu season had an effectiveness in the range of 50%. Of course, the thing that dings flu shot effectiveness is variant strains, while all the current COVID vaccines were designed from the original Wuhan strain (?), and likely have varying effectiveness against variant strains.
It's just what I heard on the Dutch news, but IIRC there are things you can do to make side effects less bad (I guess e.g. experiment with lower dosages), but doing those things will delay the vaccine. Which of course wasn't desirable, so they opted for a higher certainty of having a working vaccines sooner over having fewer side effects. In the future, side effects could be less severe.
They do seem to be - anecdotally like half people have a day off work. I guess it must be something to do with the nature of the virus as the vaccines seem much the same that way.
Spitballing outta my rear here – but could it be that we have a lot more exposure to flu-like viruses, whereas Corona viruses are comparatively novel, at least as far as the immune system's concerned, so there'a a lot more a struggle for the body to acclimatise?
I wonder if the reaction from the vaccination is proportional to the reaction from the actual virus - e.g. would you have been hospitalised with the actual virus?
My understanding is that the heavy reaction after inoculation of a vaccine means that your immune system is working, as expected. So I'd say rather opposite, as a fast, strong immune reaction would fight COVID better. But I am working from decades old biology knowledge here.
This BBC reporter has written of his experience of taking the AstraZeneca vaccine:
"The worst was the migraine and vomiting, but I also had aches, chills and exhaustion."
The reporter recovered but wonders why some people get more severe side-effects than others. Could it have something to do with age? Paradoxically, the older you are, the less likely you are to experience side-effects.
Vaccine side effects: My experience of them and what they mean:
Older people tend to have weaker immune responses than younger people. Nothing to wonder about, asking his doctor, in case of the journalist, would have answered that question. Or Google. But then he wouldn't have been able to write yet another AZ side effects article.
After my first I had a severe fever/night sweats for two nights (paracetamol helped a lot/meant I could sleep). The second dose gave me no symptoms whatsoever (as suggested by both vaccinators that this would likely be the case).
This seems to be the case for younger/healthier people.
One of the many reasons Germany is lagging so much behind. We insist in administering the second shot after three weeks, even if we could wait (and should, maybe) up to two months. And we have a tendency to keep the second shot in stock already before applying the first one. But what can you do when you fly blond, with instruments and a compass.
No. Feeling ill is mostly due to the innate immune response which declines with age (so seniors have fewer side effects). The adaptive immunity triggered does not seem to be correlated with the innate response or feeling ill.
As usual it depends on your case. You can have a big immune response, but still within the range your body can take, and you won’t be feeling ill.
I think kids will often have very visible effects after vaccination, while adults in their prime are usually more solid and won’t notice much of what’s going on internally.
In Europe 18 thromboembolic events reported for 20 million immunisations using the vaccine, so it's hard to imagine why some countries there have suspended it's use.
In Norway, there are now three deaths after vaccination (antibodies have not yet been reported in all cases, though) in people below 55 years. That's a huge number; for comparison, eight women below 60 years have died from COVID-19 (in total)
Even more so considering that, IIRC, only about 120K people were vaccinated with AstraZeneca in Norway.
There is something strange going on in Scandinavia because UK has reported nothing special with two orders of magnitude more people vaccinated. But it's definitely a cause for concern, at the very least.
The UK vaccinated old people first. At least here in Germany we had the problem that AstraZeneca was only allowed to be used with people <65. That could be one explanation.
Not just immunocompromised. Group 6 was anyone <65yo with a clinical condition which made them more vulnerable. Nearly 7 million people were eligable for that. I imagine they have nearly been done by now, and at least half would have had AZ, so that's 3.5m young(ish) people that have had AZ used.
>There is something strange going on in Scandinavia because UK has reported nothing special with two orders of magnitude more people vaccinated.
I don't want to start conspiracy theories but I wouldn't be surprised if it came to light that, in the UK, reports about deaths and side-effects have been suppressed. In the wake of a disastrous Brexit, the UK is in desperate need of a success story and with the Astrazeneca/Oxford vaccine seen as the British contender, it might have become a question of national pride to have it succeed. British newspapers (well, tabloids) present the UK vaccination rate as a vindictive competition with the EU.
> I wouldn't be surprised if it came to light that, in the UK, reports about deaths and side-effects have been suppressed
If we (I'm British) were accomplished enough to reputation-manage for the vaccine response, I'd have expected the initial (huge) death toll to have been under-reported too - which it clearly hasn't.
It's about as moronic as the people calling individual EU countries' cautious response to the blood clotting cases a political face saving measure by Brussels.
> it's hard to imagine why some countries there have suspended it's use
Really? I can imagine quite a few reasons:
* When usage was suspended, it wasn't yet known whether it was limited to 18 cases or that was just the top of the iceberg.
* Even 1 death in a million outpaces COVID-19 deaths in young people, so vaccinating could be worse than not doing anything for them.
* Vaccins with fatal side effects can significantly reduce the willingness to be vaccinated, so even if statistically it's a good trade-off, the end result can be better by not using it.
And it's not like the doses that would've been used in those few days were thrown away. They were simply rescheduled for a week later -- the full vaccination effort isn't going to be done any day later due to this delay.
Well, yes, but you have to consider that (hopefully) everyone will get the vaccine, and not everyone will get COVID. Infection rates are below 1 out of 60 in many countries.
To be fair, I shouldn't have said that it'd be better than doing nothing (because in that case eventually everyone will get COVID-19), but it'd still be better to wait for another vaccine.
People seem to think that delivered vaccine doses will get thrown into the trash during the suspension. In reality it just means that the doses accumulate for a week or two and will be administered more quickly after vaccinations are resumed.
Because if you cause 1 death by doing something, it’s your fault and you’ll have to defend yourself. But if you don’t to something and 100 people die, you can just blame something or someone else. In this case then it’s just the fault of those anti-maskers, or whatever group you point at.
I think it only counts as sticking one's neck out and being responsible if you deviate from the policy followed by the herd, whether it's to do something or do nothing.
As a politician the only thing that counts is what sticks to you, and those 100 deaths that happened because you were doing nothing will not stick to you. That’s just not the way people think.
You're a public official in Germany. You have a pandemic raging that already killed 75000 with at most 25% of population that had a disease. On the other hand you have a vaccine that kills 37 for 17 000 000 jabs provided (360 if scaled to 2 jabs to everyone).
One death is of course too many. 360 even more so. But if an alternative is an extra 75'000 I know which choice I would like my public officials to make.
Everybody knows that the alternative is not an extra 75'000 deaths. Perhaps your implicit criticism of public officials is warranted, and I would love to see a well-reasoned argument -- but as it stands I think your comment is quite unhelpful.
My point is that even a young and fit person has a higher chance of dying of COVID (10x or 100x higher) than by blood clots from the vaccine, given what we know about that risk.
Yep, doesn't help. France has a critical election next year. Germany has a couple this year, including a federal one. And sometimes I wonder whether politicians base COVID measures on their election chances or on effectiveness.
Because it makes for a great excuse for their failure to negotiate their vaccine contracts. The US/UK contracts have a US/UK first clause whereas the EU's don't, despite them being the first to sign with AstraZeneca for example. Now they are stuck exporting vaccines to the rest of the world.
The medial regulators are not nearly as political as commenters think. There are legitimate concerns in smaller countries about the vaccine because even just few cases of deaths if young people quickly outweigh the number of young people died from covid.
> Because it makes for a great excuse for their failure to negotiate their vaccine contracts.
This argument is beyond ridiculous. It was the decision of health officials, and it wasn't just countries part of eu that have suspended AZ vaccinations.
The UK was a beneficiary of the original contract signed on May 17. The EU signed its contract on August 27, the day before another contract was signed by the UK.
(edited to clarify dates)
While it is true that the eu got screwed by the us and the uk - there is no conspiracy wrt the temporary stoppage of the az roll out - the blood clots were first reported in Norway which is not in the eu.
Pretty sure this is wrong. The UK and the EU paid to set up separate supply chains for the AstraZeneca vaccine, with the UK having first dibs on the output of the UK one (which ended up with better yields, likely in part due to being agreed on and set up first). The EU kept on blaming AstraZeneca's failure to supply enough vaccines to EU countries on them exporting the EU-produced ones to the UK, but as far as I know there's no evidence that ever happened despite police raids on the production facilities and new requirements to get licenses to export vaccines. Also the numbers don't add up at all.
The AstraZeneca vaccine is also the only one with this kind of segregated supply chain, apparently as some kind of contingency plan against vaccine nationalism cutting off imports. All the others, the UK has been content to order from plants within the EU and trust that they won't pull some cynical, Trump-esque vaccine nationalism stunt and cut off exports to distract from their own problems. This appears to have been a serious misjudgement. (And to be clear, distracting from their own problems is pretty much all it would achieve. The UK is so much smaller than the EU that cutting off exports would give very little help to their own vaccine roll-out despite causing massive disruption to the UK one - and that's before even considering the possibility of retaliation.)
> The UK and the EU paid to set up separate supply chains for the AstraZeneca vaccine, with the UK having first dibs on the output of the UK one
The UK is included in the contract of the EU the same way as the EU is included in the one of the EU. That's why there are discussions about the export of vaccine to begin with. Right now AZ exports a few millions of doses out of the EU to the UK.
> The US/UK contracts have a US/UK first clause whereas the EU's don't
True, and you can see how the UK gov is fearing the export block. Darned if the EU does, darned if it doesn't. But if doing means more vaccines to the EU so be it.
Though yes, it was probably a mistake treating AZ as a reliable partner and not someone who'll try find any excuses to skip on their obligations. Though it will be hard to convince a judge they're filling their "best effort" requirements
> "it was probably a mistake treating AZ as a reliable partner and not someone who'll try find any excuses to skip on their obligations."
Given they had prior obligations to the UK, I'd say they've been a very reliable partner - to the extent of risking annoying a major market by saying no to the EU.
According to Norwegian mainstream tabloid Dagbladet (The Daily Paper), two more people have died due to complications following vaccination with the AstraZeneca vaccine. Norwegian language source: https://www.dagbladet.no/nyheter/to-nye-personer-dode-etter-...
So what would normally take 8-10 years of well structured clinical trials with blinds, is now considered safe? And when a country carefully shows that bloodclots are occurring with high predictability should just be ignored?
> It will also help allay safety concerns that have disrupted its use in the European Union after a small number of reports of rare blood clots in people who have received the shot.
Yes, but that rumour will now never go away, and the tin-foil-hatters will have more of a reason to claim "big pharma" is behind it all.
Instead of all this research into proving it's safe (which it already was, even with minimal bad side-effects, I mean, even anti-conception pills have side-effects, a minimal amount of negative side-effects would statistically be fine and not worth a fuss), I wish scientists around the world spent more time on how to properly convince vaccine-skeptics that it's safe AND a good idea to take part.
The biggest danger isn't the vaccines, it's people refusing to take them.
I don't see how it would help with this, as the study had 32,000 participants. That wouldn't tell you much about rare side effects that appear on the order of 1 per a hundred thousand.
The blod clots are not a rumour, they're there. It's not certain the vaccine caused them, but that doesn't make this a rumour. And the events do seem to be unusual enough that they certainly need investigation.
Doesn't mean the vaccine is unsafe, the events seem to be still very rare, even if they are caused by the vaccine, so the benefits still outweigh the risks. But the events are very serious, so this does need to be monitored closely and needs to be taken seriously. Downplaying potential side effects is not the way to create trust in the vaccine.
That's just dishonest reporting of facts. People died after getting the vaccines, too. In car accidents. Unrelated but nice clickbait headlines.
> It's not certain the vaccine caused them, but that doesn't make this a rumour. And the events do seem to be unusual enough that they certainly need investigation.
The rumour is that the vaccines caused it. The rumour is NOT the blood clots.
It doesn't really matter that they have one more reason. The tinfoilhat-crowd (we call them 'wappies' in Dutch) will latch onto anything. If not this, then something else will take its place; the supply of bogus arguments is inexhaustible.
What matters is that the concerns the general populace may have are addressed, and usually they are. A GP who takes the time to get to know their patients and allay any concerns about vaccination in general is much more important to be able to reach the people who may have read weird things on social media, but are not in full-out wappie-teritory.
>The tinfoilhat-crowd (we call them 'wappies' in Dutch)
A very divisive term which will only increase the divide between the "believers" and "nonbelievers". Please treat people who don't share your ideas & ideals with respect and don't use blanket statements to demonize groups.
The history of the pharmaceutical industry is absolutely jam packed with deception, corruption and sinister lobbying.
Read up on the Sackler family for a good overview of horrible practices that is just the tip of an enormous iceberg.
The fact that a group of idiots exists doesn't mean one should talk about "big pharma" like it's fantasy.
It's corporate lobbying, and it exists in all industries. And it's often pretty bad.
I find it incredible that people on a "hacker" forum has become so incredibly authoritarian and uniform, and call even the slightest sceptic all kinds of names. Even if some of them are dumb people.
All of these companies incentives is : profit. Like always.
There has been a myriad of medical scandals over the last 100 years where profit has trumped safety.
Why should anything be different now suddenly?
One should handle everything with extreme scrutiny especially in vaccines tested way less than normal.
This should not be "controversial" to say for any science minded person.
Anti-vaxxers of the tinfoil hat variety are most emphatically not 'the slightest sceptic'. Once you get into that category you are way off the deep end.
Many people dislike the way big pharma works. I do. I hate how medicine for rare deceases is frequently treated as a bargaining tool by large pharmaceutical companies to put pressure on national governments to choose between paying the outrageous prices that have no bearing on cost or even healthy profits at all, or else explain to a nation why that medicine can no longer be covered by insurance.
But that's not quite the same as thinking Bill Gates is putting 5G nanochips in the corana-vaccines, or outright denying that covid even exists. We're not talking concerned medical professionals or other science minded people acting as whistle-blower, but yoga teachers with dubious real estate holdings who are calling the recent elections fraudulent because their spur-of-the-moment political party didn't win any seats (to allude to one infamous Dutch example).
Some people have standpoints that are not only absurd, but harmful. Pretending that these people may have a point and offering them a platform is harmful.
Fair enough. There definitely is a lunatic fringe.
I'm not sure they are that big of a threat though, seems like a small minority to me amplified by social media.
I know there is a heavy focus on "killing the fringes" atm. but i don't know if i agree.
The focus must be on good education, and generally better and more research journalism which is sorely missing, leaving large parts of politics / economics / lobbyism / tech-policy making in the darkness creating a landscape where people speculate from correct "hunches" that sadly quickly becomes fantasy and community for these people that for the most part are searching for some grounding in a large chaotic world.
I wish scientists around the world spent more time on how to properly convince vaccine-skeptics that it's safe AND a good idea to take part.
You are being disingenuous here. The vast majority of skeptics in this case are people who have been thoroughly vaccinated against other things and are simply concerned about the accelerated testing schedule of these particular vaccines.
> I wish scientists around the world spent more time on how to properly convince vaccine-skeptics that it's safe AND a good idea to take part.
I completely disagree. I think part of why this anti-science attitude is prevalent is because people acknowledge it an try to respond to it. You should not engage in a conversation about whether vaccines cause autism or whether the earth is flat. You simply enact policies that enforce the right thing. Because this shouldn't be a discussion.
Responding to those people only validates their stance.
"You simply enact policies that enforce the right thing"
That's a very naïve view of how science (and the world) works. Who gets to decide what "the right thing" is? What if they're later proven wrong, do their good intentions undo whatever damage is caused?
Personally I think individual schools should have the right to demand vaccinations, but demanding every kid to be vaccinated to be allowed to school would not be the right thing, no. People who don't want to vaccinate should be allowed to seek institutions that school their kids without vaccinations.
These people want the best, too, mostly. Education should ALWAYS be the go-to default in any situation. These people need to be educated, not ignored, nor ridiculed.
Enforcing the "right thing" will alienate these people even more than they already are. They won't feel listened to and fall back into their echo-chambers even more.
Two more deaths after the AZ vaccine in Norway yesterday. So far 120-130k vaccinated here, all of them under 65. 4 of them dead after very unusual and hard to treat thrombosis. Treating doc at Oslo university hospital has said the vaccine is very likely the cause. This vaccine is halted in Norway in it will likely stay that way for the foreseeable future.
The most recent news continues to reinforce the idea that AZ is simply not effective at ALL against the B.1.351 SA variant, which is worrisome if it ends up dominating outside of South Africa.
Pfizer and Moderna both seem to show lower neutralizing antibody responses, but not nothing, and while there is some question of if "2/3rds less is enough," there's also some other significant considerations around the T-cell response that's triggered by those two and its robust effectiveness even against B.1.351. But not so much with AZ, which continues to show itself as ineffective against the variant: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/91658
If it is true, then in the long run AZ vaccine is close to useless. B.1.351 will just spread all over the world as quickly the original virus did, and we'll have to revaccinate with something else anyway. Which can also be complicated if something else is a viral vector vaccine too.
I understand they are already modifying the vaccine to handle the B.1.351 variant so all that will be needed is a third booster shot for people who have already got the AZ vaccine.
In the UK we vaccinate for whatever variants of the flu are circulating every year, Corona is going to be the same. I've heard experts widely state that since the pandemic started.
While it's certainly not a good sign, you have to consider the huge error bars on the statistics in that study, and the fact that nobody in that study (both in treatment group and control group) caught severe COVID-19 that would require hospitalization and/or died, so there's no data at all yet on whether it's effective in preventing hospitalization and/or death.
That is the exact same study that was reported on weeks ago. There isn't any new information and that study is flawed. You can refer back to discussions on it from weeks ago.
Sadly there isn't strong data about hospitalizations and death for the SA variant. AZ is clearly less likely to stop you from getting the virus, testing positive, and having a mild to moderate case. But that is actually acceptable if you're highly protected from hospitalization and death -- we've turned it into the common cold.
There are no known cases of the 501.V2 variant in either Chile or Peru, and the US has only had 143 cases by now. Besides, the trials were probably done months ago. If I’m not wrong, the Chilean one started in December.
I overheard a rather loud phone conversation yesterday where a guy was urging his friend not to use AstraZeneca under any circumstances. Such things spread like fire.
It's reasonable. It's kind of a trolley problem scenario. Do I actively play Russian roulette with 1 bullet in a 100,000 chamber gun, or do I passively try to avoid the game altogether?
Why 3/100? Covid is clearly killing far less than 3% of the infected, and far less than 3% of the general population when you factor in that not everyone is going to catch it.
AZ ban game in EU has more to do with the internal politics than with the medical argumentation.
For many of the corrupt governments it's easier to say "we don't vaccinate because AZ is not safe" that the cold truth "we don't vaccinate because we were not able to order enough vaccines on time."
The reason why we don't have enough vaccines in the EU is:
- Can't get Moderna, Pfizer/Biontech because "America first"
- Can't get enough AZ because UK was faster with ordering
- Can't get Sputnik, Sinovac because US doesn't want that their vassals buy from their enemies
I think it is complete bullshit to blame everything on the US. The EU government screwed up. Biontech was even developed in Europe, how exactly can the US prevent its use here?
You may well be correct, technically (I'll admit, I've not got a clue) but it seems that late May was essentially when an agreement in all but the finalised signing was made, with the UK government investing £65M in the Oxford/AZ vaccine effort.
I'm pretty sure the EU invested more in the AZ vaccine in total over the course of things. Honestly, this just seems to be petty "We want the vaccines so we can vaccine non risk groups" while the EU needs to vaccinate their risk group. The Tories have used the vaccine program to divert from the hide their corruption and incomptence.
A cursory Google search implies that the EU did indeed invest quite a lot of money on the AZ vaccine roll out, mid-August, after it had already entered trials which had been part-funded by the UK government months earlier.
The EU investment appears to amount to a deposit on actual vaccine doses, and a sum to ensure that dose costs are kept at cost until the pandemic is over - rather than a support of the development itself, which appears to have mostly born by AZ itself, the UK government and Oxford university. The UK has since spent billions (about £3Bn?) on AZ Vaccine procurement, a figure which dwarfs the EU's spend on the same (I think it's something like EUR360M?).
As much as I dislike politics and am disgusted by some of the costs - especially around PPEs last year (which seems to have been much abused) - I find it easier to believe that there was a lot of panicked flailing and a gamble on vaccines as a way out of this mess that would allow the UK to get started back up ASAP, which they're now reaping, rather than using the current mess as a distractionary political football.
They are looking into Sputnik, but because it is Russia we need to test it for our selves.
The same would be the case with Sinovac, with the added proviso that I would want to know if it had been developed using human tests on their concentration camp inmates.
By not lowering the age group the govt is delaying again and the cases are rising . If we have the vaccines , we have the doctors and the infrastructure why are we wasting valuable time ? Also the wastage of the vaccine is high as once you open the vaccine you need ppl to vaccinate and not many are coming by lowering the age you will find that the vaccine will be well utilized and it is the younger age group that is travelling and working
The blood clotting issue is a real challenge for world leaders.
It's very much a question of how many of these blood clot deaths are worth exchanging for COVID deaths from a vaccinated populace. What's the trade? 1 young and healthy person dies to prevent 1 covid death? 1000 covid deaths?
Remember that all these vaccines are authorized under emergency use exceptions only. The full trials done under 'normal' circumstances are not yet complete.
One thing I don't understand about the whole vaccine business is that can't they just license it to everyone in the world, so every country can produce their own vaccine already? Take AZ for example, Oxford was to go with Merck, then went for AZ, Why not both? And many more companies.
Because it's mostly not like you can throw a folder with a "recipe" over a fence and just have someone manufacture a vaccine in the required amounts and quality.
The closest ones to this are probably vector vaccines like the AZ one, because they use a "relatively" well-known delivery technique (as in: one that was at least already used for a single market-ready vaccine before the Covid-19 ones). For that reason, AZ has several production partnerships around the world already, for example with the Serum Institute of India, and the AZ vaccine is considered the likely "workhorse" for global immunization because of this relative ease of manufacturing (and storage, of course).
But it quickly gets harder with the mRNA vaccines. While those are also produced in production partnerships and subcontractor scenarios, the original producer appears to be much more intertwined with its subcontractors, performing some steps by themselves and outsourcing other steps. mRNA vaccine mass production technology is relatively proprietary and new, even newer than the already-pretty-new vector vaccine stuff, and the entire mass production scale-up has only been done very recently under massive time pressure for these Covid-19 vaccines. This basically dictates that with these outsourcing initiatives, the original producer cannot simply hand over some instructions and wait for finished vaccines to appear at the loading bay of a subcontractor, but has to transfer significant amounts of very specialized know-how to the subcontractors, which makes such operations very personnel-intensive and hard to scale.
> The closest ones to this are probably vector vaccines like the AZ one, because they use a "relatively" well-known delivery technique (as in: one that was at least already used for a single market-ready vaccine before the Covid-19 ones). For that reason, AZ has several production partnerships around the world already, for example with the Serum Institute of India, and the AZ vaccine is considered the likely "workhorse" for global immunization because of this relative ease of manufacturing (and storage, of course).
AFAIK the Serum Institute wasn't manufacturing any vector based vaccines prior to the Oxford/AZ vaccine, despite being the largest vaccine manufacturer in the world. They put in $100 Million of their own money to adapt to the AZ pipeline & scale it up.
AZ sub-licensed it (Oxford required it of them; possibly why Merck aren't involved, but I could easily be wrong on that). AZ have committed to 3 billion doses non-profit and state they have production sites in 15 countries.
It is also available under other names, for example the world's largest producer of vaccines is the Serum Institute of India, and they are making a Covishield branded version of it (they are aiming, I think, for around 900 million doses).
It's unfortunate that there is fear, but if governments didn't try to err on the side of caution and there are issues later, we'd all be pretty upset at those in charge for steaming full speed ahead with warning signs.
Vaccines are usually developed and tested over a period of 6-10 years.
If, and only if, after that much time, you don't observe any side-effects, then it is honest to declare it "safe". Everything else is just a lie to sell the product.
That's not true, all three vaccines authorised in the EU are approved under a conditional market authorisation, which is a sped up process but not an emergency authorisation.
The United Kingdom did authorise (some?) vaccines for emergency supply.
Relative risk! If over 65 the risk of severe illness with Covid is much increased and with it, the risk of blood clots is very substantial as any search on this topic reveals. Seems the reported cases of blood clots for AstraZenica vaccinations (17 million so far) is 37. Not a difficult risk assessment then unless there are predispossing factors for an individual.
Whereas it may make sense to err on the side of safety for the Danish government, who has already vaccinated the oldest and weakest 10 percent of population, who has no third wave yet, who can afford the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, who has the infrastructure for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, and who has a generally well educated population, it really complicates things in many other places.
I live in Bulgaria, where the population and even health care personnel are already skeptical. Medical doctors are old, many don't speak English. They get their news from Russia. My own physician called her patients warning us not to get a jab back in February. A third wave is well underway now. When people here heard about richer and more well functioning nations suspending the vaccine, they lost the last confidence.
Although Bulgaria has since reassumed vaccinations with AZ, I fear the damage is done. Few people are getting a jab now.
I really wish richer nations would think more globally before they rush to such decisions. Thousands of people will die in poorer nations due to the delays it causes.