251–260 of 344 posts
This decision seems illogical to many commenters here, but I assume the decision was made by professionals with all the data in front of them. Which then raises the question, why did these professionals make a decision so different than the "obvious" opinion here?
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I guess that a decision needed to be made in a timely manner to provide guidelines for those who get their second dose before end of April?
Which would mean mixing vaccines without any trials done on the effects of this. As compared to using a second AZ shot, which has been analyzed and approved. Seems risky to my untrained eye. And it wouldn't be hte first AZ related recommendation that changes every other week. We had so far: - not for people over 65 because of underrepresentation in the trials - not for people under 60 because of blood clots before an…
It's funny how "listen to the science" goes right out the fucking window the second the actual scientists say something people don't want to hear. Then it's all "akshually public health officials are just politicians" and "akshually public health officials are bad scientists" and "akshually I know better than the scientists with my PhD in Internets".
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It's a real world example of a trolley problem. They're choosing to let a large group risk severe disease or death through inaction, rather than pulling the lever and have a small group be at risk due to their actions.
Slowely I'm getting the impression that a lot of decisions around AZ are politically driven. In Germany, the new recommendation is now to use Biontech for the second shot after AZ. In that recommendation, it is also stated that there are no studies nor data supporting that. Quite funny, because there is, to my understanding, a study taking place in the Uk for that. It is expected to be done by end of April. Someone h…
This decision seems illogical to many commenters here, but I assume the decision was made by professionals with all the data in front of them. Which then raises the question, why did these professionals make a decision so different than the "obvious" opinion here?
But we do give them the power to ban medicines and that's where actual trouble can start.
And it's understandable. If every time a Japansese person stole something you heard about it sooner or later your intuition would be convinced that they're all a bunch of thieves. If you heard about every bicycle accident you'd be scared to ever ride. US cops do hear about it every time one of their number is killed and we can see the resulting paranoia with which they treat the public. And the people at health regulatory agencies get fed a constant stream of medical mishaps.
To counteract this bias any organization really needs to make explicit cost benefit analyses with real numbers if they're going to make sensible decisions. We force highway safety and toxicology regulators to do this. We really ought to have the medical regulator do it as well but for some reason we don't.
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The number of traffic-related fatalities in Denmark is around 200 per year, see e.g. [1]. Blood clots appear in 4 per 1M people (UK numbers, [3]) or 10 per 1M (Denmark numbers, [2]). That would mean about 24 to 58 Danish people would get blood clots from their first shot. Denmark had 2447 covid deaths, [4]. If you zoom in on certain age-groups, then perhaps Denmark's decision could still make sense, though. [1] https…
The history of medical ethics is interesting. We’ve sort of drifted from pure utilitarianism. One problem is that since everyone dies eventually and our statistics aren’t complete, you can usually come up with ways to justify doing pretty much anything from a utilitarian standpoint.
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Sweden did not "go back on it". They remain with significantly lighter restrictions than ~all of continental Europe: https://www.folkhalsomyndigheten.se/the-public-health-agency... As far as I can tell, their most stringent restrictions are limits on group gatherings to 8, and closing bars at 8pm: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-30/swedish-h... Contrast to France, Italy, the UK, Belgium, etc., where p…
And Sweden has the worst infection and death rates per capita compared to all of Scandinavia: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1113834/cumulative-coron... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14034948209802... https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/sweden
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/24/swedens-2020-death-...
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Well...not really. The UK manufacturing capacity is tiny from a global perspective. The EU tried to scapegoat the UK for their failure to run an efficient procurement, but that was just irrational politicking. The U.S. obviously has more manufacturing capacity, but like the UK it basically has no chance of dealing with the pandemic without mass vaccination, so exports are a political non starter. What was really requ…
> so exports are a political non-starter ...in the US and the UK. In the end it's also a reflection of what is important to a nation. Should the strong help the weak? Is it every man for themselves? Thank you for making my point. I think pointing to "international organizations" to do something, when you could have done something yourself, is a weak argument.
The UK has no ban on vaccine exports. It is more accurately the case that nobody has ordered vaccines from the UK except for the UK itself, because the UK had absolutely zero vaccine manufacturing facilities.
And of course it is factually false in any case: https://www.dw.com/en/australia-receives-astrazeneca-vaccine...
The EU (after encouraging other countries to invest in facilities in the EU) changed its mind and interdicted vaccines going to Australia. So they got some manufactured from the UK instead. But somehow it is the UK that is the bad guy!
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https://www.npr.org/2020/09/10/911117577/the-pandemic-has-re...
"And experts worry those studies will show a spike in suicide..." The results weren't in, yet, when that article was written. The Lancet article is from April 2021; yours is from September 2020. Experts are sometimes surprised by results; it's also possible the whole-population numbers have some subsets that go up and other subsets that go down.
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The point of the trolley problem is that it’s hard to make the right decision. Yet apparently anyone who doesn’t make a decision based on the move naive application of utilitarianism is a coward.
At a government level you have to be able to weigh bodies. Because there are often deaths or serious harm on both sides of a decision. Just because it's a hard decision doesn't mean there isn't a right choice that minimizes harm. This is also true of the trolley problem. In this case one side is clearly tipping the scales by multiple orders of magnitude more. To choose that side for political reasons is cowardice and…