Malibuflyer wrote:
And fully agree here – vaccination works – that is why I’m so mad on the German politicians that they stopped AZ vaccination due to populism….
My sister works in the German Health Ministry and says the decision was wholly made by the PEI without political intervention.
What is scary is (if true) we cant even establish who made this decision.
Not only was the decision unjustifed, but it would seem no one even has the guts to own it!
Phrases like what a complete load of something, come to mind.
One justification I have just heard is that there are side effects which have appeared since the original trial, and the mere existence of such requires (in Germany) the vaccine to be stopped, regardless of how rare they may be.
In the UK, and most other places, they would just carry on so long as they are suitably rare. And they are at the ppm level.
Peter wrote:
One justification I have just heard is that there are side effects which have appeared since the original trial,
I am not sure there are?
There were clots in the original population, as would be expected in a population regardless.
Peter wrote:
One justification I have just heard is that there are side effects which have appeared since the original trial, and the mere existence of such requires (in Germany) the vaccine to be stopped, regardless of how rare they may be.In the UK, and most other places, they would just carry on so long as they are suitably rare. And they are at the ppm level.
It’s not just that they are rare, there is no evidence whatsoever of causality and the number of events does not exceed that expected anyway in the general population.
To say “it’s rare, but we carry on because the small risk is worth it” is of course a position you might take even if causality (and hence the risk) had been established, which it has not.
Graham wrote:
he number of events does not exceed that expected anyway in the general population.
Not quite. The specific issue encountered is very rare in the general population, so it looks like there is a causal link.
The idiocy is letting a still miniscule risk (both in number of incidents per million doses given, and as a proportion of all deaths linked to the vaccine) derail the vaccination train.
Graham wrote:
It’s not just that they are rare, there is no evidence whatsoever of causality and the number of events does not exceed that expected anyway in the general population.
There is no evidence on causality as there is no such thing as evidence on causality! Causality is a purely theoretical concept. People believe in causality if they observe a correlation that is consistent with a causal relationship they have made up.
And unfortunately the number of cases of this specific form of thrombosis does exceed expectations in normal population – not by a very large margin so far but looks like significant. (And yes: the vaccination is still orders of magnitude more safe than the disease)
Malibuflyer wrote:
not by a very large margin so far but looks like significant. (And yes: the vaccination is still orders of magnitude more safe than the disease)
Significant over the total vaccinations given, or significant to a specific batch?
What is the level of significance?
“Germany’s health minister, Jens Spahn, said at a press conference on 15 March that there had been seven reported cases that may be related to CVST out of 1.6 million vaccinations in Germany. Estimates of how many incidences of CVST you might expect in the general population over a year vary from two to five cases per million people to more than 15 cases per million, depending on the study.”
NS
So at the upper end you would expect 24 cases, and at the bottom end between 3 and 8 cases.
This is over a year, so in the period after the vaccine (not sure how long the period is) it may be around three times the expected number, but given how small the number is anyway, is this significant, and does it take into account whether or not the population taking part in the vaccines is older, and therefore not representative of the general population? (and possibly more likely to suffer a CVST, conjecture on my part).
