Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution' • Hacker News Board

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#411

Post by martinald » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 1:37 AM UTC

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.

It actually will, considering a giant 3rd wave is starting in many of these countries. I saw some rough french analysis that stated that for every 100k doses that are delayed for a day, it will cost 15 lives.

Germany for example has nearly 2 million doses they are delaying, so that's ~300 deaths per day that are caused by these delays. If you delay by a fortnight that's more deaths than on 9/11.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#412

Post by unanswered » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

This was always going to happen. Make it political/religious that the vaccine is 1000% safe and anyone who says otherwise is antiscience and probably a white nationalist. Then discover there may be some issues with the vaccine after all. Now the train has no fucking brakes, so you've got to derail it instead.

Meanwhile we "anti-science" folks who have been blowing the whistle all along that the vaccines were not and could not even theoretically have been adequately tested (9 women can't make a baby in one month!) will just get shat on some more for some reason.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

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Post by stjohnswarts » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 1:54 AM UTC

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.

It seems like a dumb move to me. Like you said hundreds (thousands!) are dying daily and they get a few blood clots out of 17 millions doses and they stop completely and panic, even though this stuff has been out for months now.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

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Post by finolex1 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 1:57 AM UTC

polytely wrote: post #365

andrewon wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several considerations here: 1. If holding off AstraZeneca vaccine does not affect vaccination rate during the investigation period, it is a prudent thing to do. 2. If vaccine rate is expected to drop, number of expected increase in death per day due to covid vs blood clog should be compared, if we were to minimize short term death. 3. More concerning is unknown effect that could take a long time to materialize. This…

don't discount trust in the vaccination process, it might be better to visible respond to anomalies to signal that the system that makes sure vaccinations are safe actually works.

Ironically, the suspension of vaccines has now sowed far more doubt than some isolated reports of blood clots would have.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#415

Post by stjohnswarts » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 1:58 AM UTC

jdavis703 wrote: post #377

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.

Using the Tuskegee Study is a bad example. The African American community has among the lowest rates of vaccine hesitancy, it’s about half of what Republican males report. Source: https://www.axios.com/concern-republican-coronavirus-vaccine...

It wasn't brought up for comparison it was brought up as an example of why POC have their doubt about a 90% white government telling them it's not a problem. You and I know there is a 99.99999999% chance that this is not Tuskegee 2.0, but when you've had to live with bias and doubt about government/police/etc.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

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Post by cmrdporcupine » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 2:02 AM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #301

mynameisvlad wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or alternatively, they wish to push the vaccines and end of lockdown into Spring/Summer, where natural seasonality will take care of COVID and give the appearance that lockdown and vaccines were a success. Did you somehow forget that this is the second year of Covid? We've already gone through the whole "natural seasonality" cycle and the disease is very much still here.

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:/…

It's not a surprise that an airborne virus spreads more during the time of year when people are spending more time indoors with their windows closed.

Same reason it was rampant in the US subtropical south during last summer, when it was uncomfortably hot and people stayed inside where there's AC.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

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Post by curmudgeon22 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 2:05 AM UTC

wbronitsky wrote: post #313

ktybdr wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are definitely people with the view that they should be mandatory and I've personally started to encounter social pressure to get vaccinated, which I don't want to do, because I lead a low-contact hermit's life and the odds of dying from COVID which I probably won't catch if I maintain my lifestyle a few more months appears to be lower than the chance I'll die from a vaccine that I definitely get For my age coh…

I’m curious as to why you find the injection questionable? From my understanding, all of the vaccines approved in the US followed the same path every other vaccine follows. The difference was that Covid is everywhere, so stage 3 went really quickly, where it could normally take many months or years for the requisite amount of people to catch the disease in question. To me, these vaccines have been as rigorously teste…

For what it’s worth, the vaccines have been released under Emergency Use Authorization, not the normal approval process. The EUA still requires safety data etc.. but isn’t as rigorous as the full process. Here’s a decent write up: https://theconversation.com/what-are-emergency-use-authoriza...

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#418

Post by finolex1 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 2:08 AM UTC

tazjin wrote: post #302

sradman wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The EMA has said that as of March 10, a total of 30 cases of blood clotting had been reported among close to 5 million people vaccinated with the AstraZeneca shot in the European Economic Area, which links 30 European countries. "The decision today is purely precautionary..." given this level of signal. We don't have details on the age groups involved and the normal rates expected but I can hazard a Fermi Estimate…

> the risk is minuscule compared to COVID-19 itself You don't know this at all - we don't know what age groups are affected here, and COVID is pretty much negligible in many younger age groups. It's best to wait for more data to come in before drawing any conclusions.

Then why not temporarily suspend vaccinations only for those under 40? Or let people have a choice in determining whether the risk is worth it for them.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#419

Post by elboulangero » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 2:24 AM UTC

Rochus wrote: post #143

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...

From the article: Compared to the status of 11.03.2021, additional cases (as of Monday, 15.03.2021) have now been reported in Germany. In the analysis of the new data status, the experts of the Paul Ehrlich Institute now see a striking accumulation of a special form of very rare cerebral vein thrombosis (sinus vein thrombosis) in conjunction with a deficiency of blood platelets (thrombocytopenia) and bleeding in temp…

There's an English version straight on their site, no need for a translator: https://www.pei.de/EN/newsroom/hp-news/2021/210315-pei-infor...

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

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Post by nabeelms » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 2:29 AM UTC

geff82 wrote: post #389

2ion wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Let's not forget that the German government resorts to "alternative facts" since the pandemic began just as they see fit. When we had nor masks available last march, they said "masks are useless" two months later they were mandatory "because they are the best thing we have". Recently, a post by the government on Facebook said "AstraZeneca gave us one of the best vaccines ever" just as people started to cancel their a…

I'm not aware what exactly the German government has said in the past w.r.t mask usage. However, governments claiming mask usage was not required near the start of the pandemic followed by them later requiring people to use masks was actually an understandable decision on their part from what I've understood of the situation as it unveiled.

At the beginning of the pandemic, it was believed that the virus was using droplet transmission alone. In such a scenario, surgical masks, for the general public, would only be required in people who were sick to prevent transmission and N95 masks would primarily be required by health care workers. Considering the mask shortages faced in many countries at the time due to panic buying, the communications made by governments to the public w.r.t the benefits of masks make sense from a cost benefit perspective since it would guarantee that the people who needed the masks the most (medical workers and sick people) would receive them and reduce the spread of the virus.

Fast forward 2 months later, airborne transmission as well as asymptomatic transmission of the virus were both confirmed independently in several labs. This would mean that the prior strategy of only using surgical masks on sick people wouldn't really work well anymore. In the meanwhile, the availability of masks was much higher due to increased production. Hence, to reduce the risks of airborne and asymptomatic transmissions, governments released advisories asking all people to wear masks.