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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'

#471

Post by hef19898 »

colechristensen wrote: post #391
hef19898 wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fro…

But you cannot stack people that died, past tense, with people that might die from something else. The best comparison would be comparing people that might die from blood clots against additional people that might die from COVID.

Neither of us was doing that so far. Case mortality seems to be the best basis, adjusted maybe for overall risk of infection when everything is opened up and nobody is using masks anymore. At which point any comparison most likely degenerated into guess work.

The main difference so is that vaccinations reduce the overall risk for the population. And we didn't even talk about severe long term effects of COVID.

That being said, we live with a lot of medications that have severe side effects in the 1/100,000 plus bracket without breaking a sweat.

By the way, I don't see how you come to the conclusion that the AZ vaccine is in any way riskier than COVID.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#472

Post by WildParser »

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…

And still nobody bothered to check what kind of trend-changes are visible in the epidemiological curves around the time of masking.

People never look at "date of death" or "infection date" all they care about is "reporting date" - and every newspaper out there will show you the effects of government measures on "reporting".

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#473

Post by blub »

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…

Every country in the world except South Korea, HK, China and Taiwan failed to recognise the importance of masks at the beginning only to later change their minds.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#474

Post by rleigh »

h3cate wrote: post #322
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.

The UK has been in lockdown for the last 3 months. If cases are dropping the vaccine is not likely to be the main reason why.

This simply isn't true.

When you plot the infection and death rates of the vaccinated vs the unvaccinated population, the rates in the vaccinated group drop like a stone. The effect is highly significant.

The vaccination strategy is highly effective and is absolutely a major contributor (if not the primary contributor) to the decline.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#475

Post by hef19898 »

Arnt wrote: post #457
hef19898 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccines are not that different just because they are for different sickness. And there are no vaccines with any of these side effects, so there is no reason to believe the COVID vaccines will cause anything even close to that. Besides the normal stuff every drug has.

That begs the question: For which kind of medicine is there a reason to believe that they may cause anything even close to that?

Contagan, which is part of the reason why we have the drug approval process we have. And ever since, we didn't have anything comparable. At least not that I remember.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#476

Post by blub »

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…

Your claims are off-topic and irrelevant with respect to the safety of this vaccine.

Any potential safety issues with vaccines must be investigated, otherwise there will be a huge problem with trust in vaccines and in the regulator. There's already a huge problem with vaccine skepticism, and vaccine fanatics are making things worse.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#477

Post by blub »

mapme wrote: post #445
tazjin wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Susceptible to infection, absolutely, but are they suffering severe symptoms or dying in large numbers? No. A single metric (e.g. positive tests) is not enough to assess any severity here, and even those metrics come with caveats because all of our methods of determining them are imprecise.

A simulation from the economist gives ~2% chance of being hospitalized if you get COVID as a 29 yr old male with no comorbidities. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/covid-pandemic-mort...

i.e. if a very large number of young people get sick, there will be sufficient severe cases among their population to fill up intensive care beds and there will also be many people with sequelae.

But in Germany and Europe children can't get vaccinated and by the time young adults can it will be September anyway.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#478

Post by blub »

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.)

Your claim is false, because for some (many?) people this disease doesn't seem to cause even mild symptoms. It's always possible that some terrible consequence will only be visible years later, like for Measles, but we don't know that.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#479

Post by f6v »

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…

Also, “closing the borders is absolutely out of the question”.

Re: Germany pauses AstraZeneca vaccinations as a 'precaution'

#480

Post by rleigh »

hatch_q wrote: post #240
fasteddie31003 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the trolly problem. Pull the lever and kill one person. Don't pull the lever and kill 3 people. I'm a lever puller.

But the real risk here is that the lever will get stuck. Even if 1 person dies from vaccine - it can create huge, long-lasting case against vaccination, causing more people to choose not to vaccinate and eventually killing a lot more people. There must be no doubts with vaccines, 100% trust in them is essential.

> There must be no doubts with vaccines, 100% trust in them is essential.

Completely unrealistic. Everything in life has associated risks, and vaccines do carry a (small) risk.

It would be better to educate people about understanding and balancing relative risks rather than sensationalising a few outliers. The main fault here lies with the lack of proper rational discussion in the media.

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