281–290 of 572 posts
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The solution is simple though: politicians simply ask experts how many people die if they do X versus Y, and make sure it is recorded (e.g. by journalists) so they can refer to it later.
Now as a politician, you just need to find the right expert that will recommend you whatever you want to do.
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Is that the real reason? In times of crisis one must be wary of propaganda. AstraZeneca has recently announced they'd deliver even less to the EU because of Italy's interception of the delivery headed to Australia [0]... Europe having to halt the vaccinations with AstraZeneca due to none being in stock makes europe lose far more face than halting them because of quality concerns... [0]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/a…
The Paul Ehrlich Institut is an independent scientific institute, who make suggestions based on science. Of course they are influenced by what they see in the news and questions by the government, but aren't a political player. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ehrlich_Institute
They are hopefully scientific, but they are definitely not independent, not even by name.
You do have to wonder if some of this is politically driven. Germany are losing hundreds of life's a day, while in the meantime the UK has administrated 23 million doses (not sure the ratio of those that were AstraZeneca) and not recorded a single fatality or adverse reaction and are seeing infection rates / deaths drop. I can understand caution under normal circumstances, but nothing is normal right now.
A problem with bureaucracies is that they often care deeply if people die from an action they are responsible for, but are fine if there are massive deaths due to inaction.
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Ummmm....we can wait and get another vaccine? The vaccine is done on HEALTHY people, we're not talking about meds on terminal stage cancer patients with nothing to lose.
You can also just expose yourself to the virus and build immunity that way. Up to you.
That doesn't work so great if you don't die and have lifelong complications, though. It doesn't work so great if you get it and kill your child/grandmother either.
It doesn't work so well if you have to catch the virus multiple times to have immunity either (folks aren't always immune after catching it). Not to mention the unknowns with mutations of the virus.
It is seriously much better to try to avoid catching the virus at all. The virus means you might be ok... or you might die, or you might have a lifetime of suffering that you wouldn't get with a vaccine.
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0.58% is an order of magnitude higher then 30 out of 17 million. Going by these numbers, AZ is still better than COVID. And I doubt any worse than other vaccines.
That is an incorrect statistical comparison. It is 0.58% of all deaths being caused by covid. As in 994 out of 1000 people under 18 died in the same period from other things. Compared to people who are alive covid killed 0.000288% (or 1 in 350,000) under 18s. 30 in 17M is too few to have a reliable statistic, but that comes out to 1 in 567,000. If that holds, is age invariant, etc. etc. and ignoring the time-based na…
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You're missing the point. This is an anomaly. It's not about the "oh it's worth the risk compared to COVID 19". If it's a side effect it wasn't spotted in the trials, why was that? It's not a side effect? It was a problem in production? What problem? Was is tampered with or was an accident? What failed in QA to let that batch come to the public? Was is a storage problem that compromised the batch quality? Was it whil…
And those last couple of sentences are really, really important: If forging ahead despite the blood clotting causes folks to lose trust in vaccines, it could be worse than Covid has. And realistically, we don't need more folks to be anti-vaccine.
Imagine this is the outcome of a production problem, yet regulators refused to acknowledge this until it was out of proportions because the problem wasn't fixed. Not only people would lose trust on vaccines, they would lose trust on the regulator - this extends far beyond this vaccine, but all vaccines and medicines.
People need to feel safe, and to know that regulators are not sleeping on their job. It's not a bureaucratic job, but that they are actively looking at data and reports from doctors.
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Because one "low" is few orders of magnitude lower than other "low".
Right, but that's assuming you get the virus; to properly compare it you have to factor the chance you contract the virus in the first place. I'm not saying the math works out better, I haven't done it myself, but I'd bet most people would choose to try to avoid contracting
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The Paul Ehrlich Institut is an independent scientific institute, who make suggestions based on science. Of course they are influenced by what they see in the news and questions by the government, but aren't a political player. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ehrlich_Institute
> The Paul Ehrlich Institute (German: Paul-Ehrlich-Institut – Bundesinstitut für Impfstoffe und biomedizinische Arzneimittel, PEI) is a German research institution and medical regulatory body, and is the German federal institute for vaccines and biomedicines. It is a federal agency and subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Health. They are hopefully scientific, but they are definitely not independent, not even by na…
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0.58% is an order of magnitude higher then 30 out of 17 million. Going by these numbers, AZ is still better than COVID. And I doubt any worse than other vaccines.
That is an incorrect statistical comparison. It is 0.58% of all deaths being caused by covid. As in 994 out of 1000 people under 18 died in the same period from other things. Compared to people who are alive covid killed 0.000288% (or 1 in 350,000) under 18s. 30 in 17M is too few to have a reliable statistic, but that comes out to 1 in 567,000. If that holds, is age invariant, etc. etc. and ignoring the time-based na…
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No one is saying side effects should not be investigated. The question is whether the vaccine administration should be halted in the meantime, and that would be determined by the risk/reward of preventing covid deaths.
Just like I trust the regulators for vaccine approval, I trust them in the decision of stopping the administration of a vaccine to further investigate the problem. This goes together. It's not a political decision no matter how many people try to spin this. This is the outcome of doctors reporting an anomaly to a regulator. The system is working, and this should give you reassurance, not doubt about the consequences…
"It's not a political decision"
From the perspective of the regulators, there are asymmetric personal consequences.
If they make a decision that leads to 50 clotting deaths but saves 5000 people from COVID as a counterfactual, their head is on a chopping block because those 5000 foregone deaths are invisible but the 50 deaths are visible.
If they make a decision to halt the vaccine distribution and this kills an extra 5000 people - well that's no problem because they were just being careful.
Society has set up a political situation where there is literally only one choice that absolves the bureaucrats from a negative personal outcome. Of course they're going to go that route.
Personal incentives are incredibly powerful drivers of behavior, whatever the publicly stated reasons for an action may happen to be.
It may be the case that they've made the right decision, but we can't assume that it was for the right reasons.