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EU agency says AstraZeneca vaccine is 'safe and effective'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: EU agency says AstraZeneca vaccine is 'safe and effective'

#31

Post by llampx »

jkingsbery wrote: post #15
underseacables wrote: post #4

At the moment this is right next to “ Norwegian experts say AstraZeneca vaccine is behind the deadly blood clots” on the front page. I think it’s up to each nation to decide for itself if a vaccine is going to work or not, but I pitty the ones they go first and suffer from overzealous cheerleading of a particular vaccines efficacy.

If it is up to each nation, that's too bad. We should be treating adults as adults, telling them "here's the information: about 30 people had bloodclots out of 5,000,000 having received the vaccine (source: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56397592 ). We're not sure if any of those 30 are linked to the vaccine. If those risks seem acceptable to you, here's the vaccine."

Well I think the other side of the calculation is a probability that you may be able to get vaccinated with the Biontech vaccine if you wait.

Re: EU agency says AstraZeneca vaccine is 'safe and effective'

#32

Post by ttesttom »

testplzignore wrote: post #21
ttesttom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this article is a bit more nuanced based on what they are seeing on the ground. Derek brings up good points about background rates, but papers over some things. It's a complex picture and the below article paints it well. Also scientists in Norway claim they found the mechanism that causes it. https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/it-s-very-special-pi... https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/KyGv2G/professo…

> AstraZeneca supplies Europe with vaccine from several plants, however, and EMA could not say whether all of the batches involved came from the same facility. Is there an answer to this yet? The batch that a particular person's dose came from is carefully documented (or at least should be - it is in the USA).

In the EMA statement from today they said:

> there is no evidence of a problem related to specific batches of the vaccine or to particular manufacturing sites;

https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-vaccine-astrazene...

Re: EU agency says AstraZeneca vaccine is 'safe and effective'

#33

Post by hef19898 »

rolph wrote: post #23
hef19898 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to some interviews and sources, the Sinus blood clots are more likely to happen with AZ. I haven't seen any numbers, especially accounting for age and demographic groups, so I cannot tell. That being said, every drug has side effects. A vaccine isn't any different.

i would like the opportunity to read these "some interviews and sources" do you have any citations to append to your qualitative comment?

One from the vaccine and immunology head of the Charité in Berlin. No idea where I read the other one, but it was in German as well. The Charité one is here:

https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/medizin/astrazeneca-das-...

Re: EU agency says AstraZeneca vaccine is 'safe and effective'

#34

Post by mytailorisrich »

It was expected all along as the EMA never suggested otherwise.

It's baffling that so many countries rushed into suspending the vaccine. By all means they should track and investigate potentially serious side effects but it's unclear to me why they escalated this so much when, at least based on the raw numbers (ie. about 50 cases of blood clots out of about 17 million injections), the incidence of blood clots is minimal even if caused by the vaccine (people have a higher risk of dying in a car accident than developing a blood clot after an injection...)

I feel some countries suspended it out of 'peer pressure'. For example it seems to me that France did not really want to suspend it but did soon after Germany announced it would. Now they have already said they will resume immediately and that the PM will get an AZ injection tomorrow to show it's fine.

Re: EU agency says AstraZeneca vaccine is 'safe and effective'

#35

Post by hef19898 »

frongpik wrote: post #27
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. The WHO listed 'vaccine hesitancy' as one of the top global health threats, and that was in mid 2019, before the pandemic. [0] On the other hand, vaccine side-effects have never been a major health threat. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine_hesitancy

Delayed side effects is a thing, especially due to interaction with other meds. Huge swaths of americans have hypertension and diabetes and take meds regularly.

I am no expert at all, or from a medical field. But my understanding is, that long term effects of vaccines are effects that last for a long time, and not effects that tale a long time to manifest.

What we see bow is the rare side effects, like blood clots, in the 30 in 5 million range. These effects are close to impossible to discover in clinical trials, because they are too rare. Again, nothing really unusual.

Once the body developed anti bodies and general resistance, the vaccine doesn't have any effects anymore anyway. So either side effects, also in conjunction with other meds, manifest right after vaccination or they don't at all.

Re: EU agency says AstraZeneca vaccine is 'safe and effective'

#36

Post by mytailorisrich »

libertine wrote: post #28
Varriount wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, if vaccinations don't continue, it's highly likely more people would die, that otherwise may have lived. Paul Hunter, an infectious disease expert at the University of East Anglia, noted in a statement that even if the risk of CVT is raised by the vaccine to five or more cases per million people vaccinated, the COVID-19 infection fatality rate for men in their mid-40s is 0.1%, or 1000 deaths per million infe…

The problem is the perceived risk, for many people getting COVID is avoidable if they take precautions, while the scenario of willingly take a vaccine that can result in death is way more darker. A lot of young people won't even find the "relief" they got from knowing COVID is more lethal on the elderly, since this seems to be happening on younger females. It's not an easy problem to fix, and I see a lot of people re…

> The problem is the perceived risk

Communication helps a lot.

If you say "50 cases in 17 million injections" people might not know what that exactly means and might be worried simply by the way it is reported. Now, if instead you qualify the above with "which is less than the chance of dying in a car crash so it's very safe" then people may be unfazed.

I feel the main problem is the way this was reported, which created an overblown perceived risk.

Re: EU agency says AstraZeneca vaccine is 'safe and effective'

#37

Post by hayd »

s_dev wrote: post #11

Surely it's inevitable that during a worldwide rollout of a new vaccine a few 'pauses' happen -- even if people find them deeply distressing. Lots of people were claiming this was politically motiviated reather than scientificially motivated. Does this confirm the motivations were scientific?

> Does this confirm the motivations were scientific?

No.

Re: EU agency says AstraZeneca vaccine is 'safe and effective'

#39

Post by hayd »

hef19898 wrote: post #35
frongpik wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delayed side effects is a thing, especially due to interaction with other meds. Huge swaths of americans have hypertension and diabetes and take meds regularly.

I am no expert at all, or from a medical field. But my understanding is, that long term effects of vaccines are effects that last for a long time, and not effects that tale a long time to manifest. What we see bow is the rare side effects, like blood clots, in the 30 in 5 million range. These effects are close to impossible to discover in clinical trials, because they are too rare. Again, nothing really unusual. Once…

> What we see bow is the rare side effects

Causation hasn't been proved and cannot be assumed.

It makes little sense to worry about this for AZ, it's a very standard viral vector vaccine.

The brand new mRNA family of vaccines however are untested in the long-term...

Re: EU agency says AstraZeneca vaccine is 'safe and effective'

#40

Post by kian »

A clarification - this isn't just 'blood clots', it is an extremely rare form of blood clotting that has a 40% risk of death, in a population that has an extremely low risk of death from COVID, where it works out to be 7x as many people have died from this new form of clotting than the general population at large would have expected in the time frame given. Given the numbers we know so far, if you are a young woman who considers herself as having a 10% chance of catching COVID, the 'known' risk of dying from the AZ vaccine is now already higher than your chances of dying from COVID. Specifically, COVID has a 10x higher known death rate than the rate of this complication in the appropriately considered population. A young woman who is working from home and taking precautions could reasonably decide that the AZ vaccine is not worth the risk, without being 'statistically illiterate'.
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