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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'

#421

Post by Rochus »

elboulangero wrote: post #419
Rochus wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Looks like they have used DeepL as well ;-)

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#422

Post by legolas2412 »

afavour wrote: post #185
Nursie wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure at this point. When it was one suspicious death, countries suspending the vaccine definitely seemed like an overreaction, and unfortunately this particular vaccine has been something of a political football and subject of a lot of noise. But as more blood-clot deaths emerge... you gotta think caution is wise. OTOH yes, we in the UK have administered a lot of this stuff, and you'd think someone would have…

> But as more blood-clot deaths emerge... you gotta think caution is wise. Last I saw it's 30 blood-clot deaths. Given the number of people that have received the vaccine that's a tiny, tiny amount. Even if those 30 were directly linkable to the vaccine (and so far no such link has been proven) you could still make the argument that the benefits of mass vaccinations outweigh the concern. I don't envy anyone in charge…

30 cases, but only 2 deaths i think.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#423

Post by ByteJockey »

nabeelms wrote: post #420
geff82 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dr…

Governments didn't say that a mask wasn't required. They said masks didn't help (presumably to prevent a run on them). It's definitely an understandable decision, but there's a big problem with it.

When officials start doing this, you have to play a sort of game where you try to figure out why they said something and what it signifies. You have to try to divine the state of reality and figure out what to do based on what you think they were trying to get people to do (there's a lot of uncertainty in this).

By that point, by definition, trust in the person (and probably the institution) is gone, and we don't have a lot of trust in institutions to spare.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#424

Post by mkoubaa »

azinman2 wrote: post #388
jdavis703 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

But people do explicitly name it as a reason not to trust the vaccine. And similar for other groups. My point still stands: with vaccines, you can’t create reasons for distrust.

You're both right

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#425

Post by zzleeper »

nabeelms wrote: post #420
geff82 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dr…

I was well aware even by March that masks were the way to go. It was a simple lie, by e.g. the Surgeon General, in order to try to save masks (while they didn't even start ramping production of them!)

But of course if a government official lies to you about your own health risks then that has very high costs, much higher than whatever masks were saved. They could have just said "masks are useful, but you need to be trained to use them correctly, they are difficult to manipulate, etc. and they are very scarce so sadly let's stay home and let doctors and nurses use them".

I might sound as if I'm upset at that, because I REALLY am. I hate when governments lie, even if they are "white lies", and I hate when they treat their constituents as kids.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#426

Post by overboard2 »

blueblimp wrote: post #403
tazjin wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

No matter who you are, vaccination is safer than catching covid. The vaccines are designed and tested for safety; covid gains evolutionary fitness from making you sick. As a result, the risks from vaccination are orders of magnitude lower, no matter what the covid risk is. (Edit: Deleted second paragraph that wasn’t clearly worded.)

Covid evolves to spread itself more effectively. The fewer symptoms it causes, the better it can spread.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#427

Post by ggreer »

libertine wrote: post #286
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly. This subject can easily backfire and blow the trust of a population on vaccines, or worst, on the regulators. 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 vaccin…

I think a lot of people (myself included) are more than willing to take a vaccine with these risks. As long as there is informed consent, what’s the problem?

Banning everyone from getting this vaccine is typical bureaucratic ass-covering. Their incentives are not aligned with ours. They get in trouble if they’re directly responsible for a few deaths, but not if they’re indirectly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

To give a point of comparison: 250 miles of driving gives you a one in a million chance of death. This vaccine is safer than that.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#428

Post by zzleeper »

m4rtink wrote: post #390
ArkanExplorer wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-... Sweden, 2020 deaths only 6.2% higher than 2018, and following a weak 2019 flu season. These are entirely acceptable death figures within the context of aging European societies. COVID is basically a once-a-decade flu variant: like Swine Flu in 2009, which came and went without lockdown: https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/sweden-monthly-... So C…

Do you want to know how bad you can get at excess mortality - what about 53 percent ? https://brnodaily.com/2020/12/16/news/excess-mortality-rate-... And that's old numbers, since then the situation only got worse: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/3/15/czech-republic-what... https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/28/europe/czech-republic-cor...

53% is nothing. Peru peaked at 260% excess mortality in February (2nd wave) and 230% in July (1st wave). My Facebook was (and is) a depressive mess of sad announcements.

Source: https://opencovid-peru.com/reportes/sinadef/ (1100 deaths per day, compared to 300 average for 2019)

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#429

Post by petre »

nabeelms wrote: post #420
geff82 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dr…

Governments followed conflicting WHO recommendations and trying not to create a PPE crisis for health workers.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#430

Post by waterheater »

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…

Not that guy, but I'll give you one viewpoint.

>To me, these vaccines have been as rigorously tested as they could be

Not for me. The fact is, the vaccines have been pushed through faster than any vaccine before. Anything foreign entering the body should be tested and based on solid evidence. Doesn't matter if it's an artificial heart, stent, prosthetic, or a biological agent like a vaccine. If decades of medical research shows determining a vaccine's safety takes years because of ethical protocols, then it takes years. The present vaccination campaigns are performing more comprehensive stage 3 trials on the general population because the risks are deemed acceptable. As other people have said in this thread, a person under the age of 18 is 50% more likely to die of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine complications than from SARS-CoV-2. The risk isn't worth it at this time.

Additionally, the technologies being used for the vaccines is still deemed experimental, specifically the mRNA ones. No mRNA vaccines have been deployed before, but now it's being deployed on the general population without public knowledge of any potential risks of this unproven technology ("unproven" meaning lacking a prior real-world deployment effort; a rocket engine is only proven when it flies, not in simulation). One risk with the mRNA vaccines is that they need to be kept extremely cold to preserve the mRNA sequences [1]. If the dose warms, good mRNA sequences break down into junk mRNA, which for all intents and purposes are random nucleotide chains. That ties into an above point: no rational person wants random mRNA pieces put into their body. Again, while all risk is relative, for my age group, the risk is not enough.

If you're well-versed in the science, I recommend reading this complaint [2] filed with the EU regarding Pfizer trial safety.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-fact-check-mrna-vaccine-s...

[2] https://2020news.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Wodarg_Yeadon...

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