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Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

reuters.com

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Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#391

Post by colechristensen »

hef19898 wrote: post #285
colechristensen wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wouldn't taking the 1 in 567,000 risk eliminate the 1 in 350,000 risk. Vaccine risk and disease risks don't stack. But I could be mistaken, statistics is hard you know.

~200 people in this age bracket in the US already died. If you gave everyone in that age bracket this particular vaccine an additional ~100 might die. They stack, they don't negate, those 200 people already died.

If the covid risk was flat over time, if you offered this vaccine yearly (quite possibly necessary) then you'd be saving ~90 lives in this age bracket per year. 10 would still die of covid, 100 would die from the vaccine, 90 whom would have died of covid would would instead survive.

It would be "better" depending on how you think about better. Telling people to throw away huge chunks of their lives to protect against a risk that you turn around and tell them they need to take a risky vaccine that's only half as bad... it isn't necessarily a good line. Especially because pandemic diseases tend to lower in their negative outcomes at time goes on, the vaccine will probably stay the same while the risk it prevents will get less and less threatening.

All of this based on statistics and assumptions that have a lot of uncertainty in them.

The bottom line is that in order to be a good idea, a vaccine needs to be much safer than the disease it prevents. Half as risky doesn't meet this mark; AZ would be fine for the oldest age bracket because the risk profile wouldn't change much, but the youngest age bracket there is a significant comparison between the two (and perhaps further unknown risks which haven't surfaced)

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#392

Post by BrissyCoder »

whyenot wrote: post #347

Vaccine skepticism is already very high in many European countries, including Germany. Vaccination doesn't work if 1/3 to 1/2 the population doesn't want to get the vaccine because they are afraid of the side effects. There may be some value in governments showing citizens how cautious they are being, even if it is not necessarily warranted based on the number of adverse reactions.

> Vaccination doesn't work if 1/3 to 1/2 the population doesn't want to get the vaccine because they are afraid of the side effects.

I get that herd immunity won't occur if a significant proportion of population isn't immunized... but it still works on an individual basis.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#393

Post by nolite »

2ion wrote: post #339
fab1an wrote: post #133

Looks like this may be a bit more relevant than many of the snarky comments would suggest - the relevant German authority on this said that they have seen a unexpected increase in a specific type of blood clotting issue that usually is very rare: https://www.pei.de/DE/newsroom/hp-meldungen/2021/210315-voru...

It's not a medically reasonable response that solicits snarky remarks, it's the complete retardation of the official covid response so far, and even reasonable decisions just are landing on a pile of steaming crap now. - billions per week of half assed lockdown vs a few billion more for high quality timeley vaccine delivieries of the good stuff --- of course they chose the lockdown - open schools as if nothing happen…

Is this Germany or elsewhere? Sounds as bad as France

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#394

Post by m4rtink »

h3cate wrote: post #323
drcode wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Difficult to call, but I hope it's all being investigated thoroughly. We don't have time for that, we can't wait for some government panel to announce in 2025 "actually the blood clots were no more common than in the general population"

Most countries are pausing rollout for 2 weeks. After over a year of covid 2 weeks won't make a big difference.

I'm not so sure about that - vaccination efforts are just finally starting to ramp up, so 2 weeks of vaccinations lost can be hundreds if not millions of people who could have been protected from covid, not to mention the side effects of these people getting infected on the already overloaded hospitals.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#395

Post by smoe »

thelean12 wrote: post #371
azinman2 wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That trolly problem is a one off. Having a major vaccine lead to serious issues puts all of vaccines into question, creating a far larger problem spanning time. It's already the case that various sub-communities are hesitant to get the vaccine based upon previous experimentation on their populations long ago, such as the Tuskegee Study.

> Having a major vaccine lead to serious issues puts all of vaccines into question, creating a far larger problem spanning time. Is pulling the vaccine (with minimal evidence that it's causing issues) worse? How many people are going to turn down the AZ vaccine now, even if there's not actually an issue?

The media stories would have come out either way.

Some people are set to not take a vaccine, they will take whatever version of this story as an argument for their view point. It is not about them.

But take someone like my father (76) as example. Not anti—vaccine at all, but a bit cautious and not in a hurry to get it. If there are stories from reputable news papers, that vaccine A causes X issue but government keeps giving them out, he would not take it. If on the other hand it got stopped, investigated and found to be harmless he would be open again.

If based on the data it should be continued to be given out while investigation is ongoing, I don’t know. I think as with a lot of things about this pandemic and it’s handling in different countries it will maybe take years to have conclusive insights in hindsight what were the right decisions.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#396

Post by tialaramex »

bananaowl wrote: post #64
giantandroids wrote: post #8

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.

According to these reports hosted on gov.uk there are reports of fatalities and reactions. Pfizer: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... AstraZeneca: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/... Disclaimer from UK.gov: Part of our monitoring role includes reviewing reports of suspected side effects. Any member of the public or health professional can submit suspected side…

Yup. In the UK when you get vaccinated they (should) give you paperwork that explains how to report any side effects. Obviously if your side effects are severe like you're struggling to breath or something your first action should be to seek medical assistance for the difficulty, not fill out a web form - somebody can do the paperwork later, but there's no reason any person who, for example, experiences otherwise unexplained dizziness for an hour the next day shouldn't write it up themselves if they don't feel they need to trouble a doctor.

The Yellow Card scheme and similar schemes are not useful for direct analysis, they're basically an aggregator for anecdotes. I had a mysterious craving for a kebab after the flu-like side effects from the Oxford vaccine subsided. Probably nothing. I'm not going to waste a doctor's time with a video appointment to report "I suddenly really wanted a kebab". But while musing about it I might as well fill out this web form (with the other boring side effects too), then it goes in the big pile and hey, maybe over the millions of shots given in this country they find 8000 people reported a craving for a kebab which is enough to be interesting even though it's unclear how that could happen or what you should do about it.

Medics are going to write a lot more of these. Patient comes in with unexplained back pain, can't recall any triggering incident, but they did get the Pfizer vaccine 10 days ago? It goes in a Yellow Card report. Again, probably nothing, patients turn up with unexplained back pain all the time, vaccine or not. But collecting these anecdotes gives us a better chance to spot real problems early, so long as we don't mistake them for serious data.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#397

Post by dcolkitt »

mcintyre1994 wrote: post #50
dcolkitt wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you see fifty years a few thousand birth defects occurred because one drug was approved too fast. Therefore millions now have to needlessly die while perfectly good vaccines go stale.

> Nearly 60 years ago thalidomide was prescribed to treat morning sickness in pregnant women. What followed was the biggest man-made medical disaster ever, where over 10,000 children were born with a range of severe and debilitating malformations. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26043938/ > The thalidomide scandal may have led to 10,000 miscarriages, stillbirths and infant deaths in Britain, according to the former d…

> The thalidomide scandal may have led to 10,000 miscarriages

So, over an entire century, the worse drug approval mistake caused fewer birth defects than the number of Covid per day. Deaths that at this point could be easily prevented by faster vaccine approval.

What rational person could possibly look at that state of affairs and not conclude that our drug approval process is trading off far too many type II errors relative to type I errors.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#398

Post by skinkestek »

lm28469 wrote: post #245
ArkanExplorer wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely more people will die from COVID than from blood clotting, due to this delay? Or perhaps not, given that 2020 deaths in Germany were 985,145, only 4.85% higher than 2019, and only 3.2% higher than 2018 (and so basically in line with what we would expect from an aging society). https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel...

> Or perhaps not, given that 2020 deaths in Germany were 985,145, only 4.85% higher than 2019, and only 3.2% higher than 2018 (and so basically in line with what we would expect from an aging society). Are we still having this debate.... Of course the overall mortality didn't change much, people stayed at home for literally 75% of the year. Do you have the split stats for accidental deaths, road deaths, disease relat…

You can check overall deaths for Europe on Euromomo.

It shows that despite everything we've done we've had significant more deaths in certain age groups.

You seem to be genuinely curious. For those who want to scoff it off: look at those numbers and consider the fact that these numbers are what we see after a war-sized effort to prevent more damage: in most populations only a few percent have been hit.

At the moment this epidemic runs unchecked a death rates also increase even more as it easily overwhelms even European health care if it isn't kept down.

And no, it is not just the elderly: my age group (40+) and above are all at risk.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#399

Post by DanielleMolloy »

tazjin wrote: post #321
blagie wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The risk *of death* from COVID is pretty negligible for some age groups. The biggest confusion of this whole situation is we've fixated on CFR numbers as a measure of risk. Risks of long-term consequences don't seem to be all that low.

I haven't seen anything that indicates that the risk of long-term consequences is significantly elevated above other viral diseases. There is a condition (which we know too little about, and which - as one of the few good outcomes of the COVID situation - is now actually getting some attention) that can lead to fatigue and other symptoms after fighting off a viral infection, but it's not unique to COVID. A year ago t…

Mh, do you really want to play down the possibility of unknown long-term consequences?

Check out this: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.02.23.432474v1

The Spanish Flu has led to a „sleeping sickness“ epidemic years after it ceased.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#400

Post by [deleted] »

addicted wrote: post #337
leereeves wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at this COVID daily trends graph from the CDC: https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailytrends... From an average of about 50k cases reported daily in April through October to about 200k cases reported daily in November, December, and January, then back down to 60k by March. And there's a similar winter increase in the worldwide cases (some of which is from the US cases, but not all): https:/…

Winter also corresponds with holiday seasons. Further, South American countries were some of the worst hit during the Nov - Feb timeline. South Africa was badly hit around this time. And all these are Southern Hemisphere countries that were experiencing summer around then. Now, there’s clear evidence that warmer weather makes things easier, since the virus has lower survivability outside a host in the heat, so all th…

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