Peter wrote:
It’s blindingly obvious actually.
Not at all – and it has already been discussed here before: We have an obvious and serious new side effect that has not been identified in trials. The case numbers are significant. The data is inconclusive – with one potential explanation that there is a significant number of hidden cases that have not been (correctly) diagnosed. This needs to be investigated.
Plus: In Germany we had only 75k Covid deaths during the entire pandemic. Therefore to delay the vaccination with a specific vaccine for some weeks will for sure not cause 10k deaths!
Peter wrote:
t looks like a lot of people are looking for a reason to not vaccinate with a particular product, which is nothing to do with the product itself.
Looks like a lot of people a priori deny the fact that a particular product has a safety issue up to the point that it must not even be researched – just because of a nationalistic affiliation to this product. And actually I absolutely can not understand this mindset: Wouldn’t it be the best that could happen to the UK if entire Europe no longer wants AZ vaccine and all the supplies go to UK?
Maybe this is what the UK is doing differently from the EU. It is taking the view of the overall benefit i.e. the “bigger picture”, and getting on with it:
That is what one would do with any other vaccine. Once the side effects are in the ppm or tens of ppm level, there is nothing useful to be gained via stopping the vaccination until a total medical understanding of the mechanism for the side effects has been achieved.
Especially when the reason for the vaccination is prevention of a near collapse of the economy, which is already causing large numbers of deaths, plus mental illness, suicides, etc. Walk into any town centre and count the percentage of businesses and livelihoods destroyed – all done purely to prevent the hospitals (and the graveyards) overflowing. So many businesses will never come back. It is a Roman-style decimation of the retail sector, no less. And so many upstream (B2B) businesses and livehoods destroyed. Airlines and all their suppliers.
The effectiveness of the policy speaks for itself, in reducing the most serious illness
I am not commenting on the other allegations; they are silly. Here in the UK, almost nobody cares which vaccine they get.
Potential side effects are inevitably cause for concern.
However, I find it odd that those not directly involved are prepared to second guess the regulatory procedure.
We have experts who spend their careers dealing with this data and ulitmately make decisions as to whether a medicine or vaccine is safe, and whether the beneifts out weigh the risks.
Of course I am not saying we go blindly into this, but it causes me concern when we second guess the processes and procedures in place.
It is bit like us pilots and the weather. Of course we all think we are meteorologists, but the reality is we are at best amateur ones, and the professionals will get it right far more often than us.
So I think we have to allow the regulators to assess and re-asses the data, and I have no doubt if there are are genuine reasons for concern, regulatory action will follow. What isnt helpful is ill informed speculation, and even if the speculation is less than ill informed, then those experts judging the data had better have complete access to all the data – I doubt any scientist worth their creditials would speculate without.
Graham wrote:
Your analogy would hold if we assume that the virus has already passed through the entire population. Clearly it hasn’t, so it doesn’t.
You missed the point about swimming. It’s not that hard to be clear of the infection. We all know what it takes. Either you know how to swim, or you don’t, or you simply don’t care about swimming at all. Right now, it’s more an issue of how long can we stay afloat without simply getting bored of it all. It’s not like the virus has disappeared all of a sudden.
MedEwok wrote:
Several German polities, such as Berlin and Munich, have again stopped giving AstraZeneca to under 60s or under 55s due to more cases of cerebral sinus vein thrombosis (CSVT), the Guardian reports
This was also on the news here today, but with a different ref, Der Spiegel.
When shopping today we met a couple friends. She is nurse, and had the AZ vaccine about 5 weeks ago. She is still feeling side effects like headache. She will probably not get the second shot. Not that it matters, because she said she would never take a second shot of that vaccine, no matter what. Maybe one shot is enough, or she will probably get a different vaccine.
dublinpilot wrote:
I couldn’t figure out from his video if the UK is aspirating or not, but Graham probably knows from his training.
It wasn’t in the training we got, no. But the training did come with a caveat that “you may get extra local procedures when you deploy”.
However we are never likely to deploy – the NHS is so keen to retain ownership of the programme and there is an enormous surplus of volunteers – despite 500k+ jabs per day the limiting factor is supply, not staff or logistics. I keep looking at the app, but there are zero vaccinations shifts available to volunteer for.
MedEwok wrote:
A good question. CVST is difficult to diagnose, maybe these few cases got dismissed as strokes in the NHS?
It’s possible, I don’t know.
I have always been under the impression that the NHS doesn’t handle unusual diagnoses particularly well, and that (as a person of reasonable education) if you find that the professionals treating you look even slightly confused then the thing to do is to break out the textbooks yourself and start researching asap.
If we scale the numbers (I did some rough calcs for the Norweigian situation) the UK should have seen over 600 of these clotting deaths. It seems unlikely that this is being covered up. What the answer is I cannot say, and as German / Scandiwegian female of 40 I would be quite hesitant. But as a British male of 39, bring it on.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
Potential side effects are inevitably cause for concern.
However, I find it odd that those not directly involved are prepared to second guess the regulatory procedure.
We have experts who spend their careers dealing with this data and ulitmately make decisions as to whether a medicine or vaccine is safe, and whether the beneifts out weigh the risks.
In Germany the decision to no longer recommend the AZ vaccine for under 60s was made by the STIKO, our national committee on vaccination, which is responsible for all vaccination guidelines. While not the regulator itself, that body is exactly the kind of decision making body which carefully screens the data and weights the risk and benefits. Exactly the experts you speak of.
And contrary to repeated accusations of political influence on the way the AZ vaccineis handled, particularlyin this thread, this body is certainly not partisan or subject to party politics or (nationalist) political games.
MedEwok wrote:
In Germany the decision to no longer recommend the AZ vaccine for under 60s was made by the STIKO, our national committee on vaccination, which is responsible for all vaccination guidelines. While not the regulator itself, that body is exactly the kind of decision making body which carefully screens the data and weights the risk and benefits. Exactly the experts you speak of.And contrary to repeated accusations of political influence on the way the AZ vaccineis handled, particularlyin this thread, this body is certainly not partisan or subject to party politics or (nationalist) political games.
I dont know how the system works in Germany. Can you shed any light on why your national regulator has not taken the same stance?
I dont see the new recommendations here – should they be?
Here is the full list of AZ vaccine adverse events in the UK between 4 January and 14 March this year, as published by the MHRA.
Note that despite them using the word ‘reaction’ this is not a list of confirmed reactions / side-effects. This is everything that happened to anyone post-vaccination, related or not, and as you can see some of them are pretty unlikely to be related! Tympanic membrane perforation and anorectal discomfort seem particularly unlikely unless the vaccinator used the needle very badly, one person had limb reattachment surgery and two people became pregnant! The most bizarre one I can find in there is that in two cases people thought the vaccine tasted abnormal!
To focus on the points of present interest, vascular disorders (which includes all kinds of thrombosis, as well as lots of other stuff) had a total of 2,532 of which 10 fatal. To look at @MedEwok’s query about whether the NHS was mistakenly counting these as strokes, strokes of all kinds total 130 of which 14 fatal.
Total events 294,820 from 78,223 reports (the average case where something was reported actually reported 3.7 things), of which 326 fatal. Not 100% clear to me whether 326 fatal means 326 unique deaths – clearly some people account for more than 1 event so I don’t know if when 1 person dies whether fatal appears against all the events for that report, or just against the one believed to have killed them? I think probably the former, because there are cases of fatal dizziness and fatal cognitive disorders in there.
It does not say how many jabs it covers, but based on the date coverage it is at least 15 million and possibly a lot more – and do remember the dataset is from a population almost all aged 50+, and mostly aged 60+, so you can expect more events and more fatals in the background than you would have for an all-adults dataset.
It seems the MHRA don’t consider anything in here statistically significant beyond background levels, at least not for the serious or fatal stuff.
