> Nations that are overcautious may lose far, far, far, far more lives thanks to covid infections than an extremely rare handful of blood clots which haven't even been tied concretely to the vaccine yet. The risk reward analysis on this topic has been really bizarre so far.
You seem to suggest risk-reward analysis be viewed at by the number of deaths.
Germany had to suspend vaccination (temporarily) due to legal reasons and risk of a lawsuit to the state.
>but I pity the ones they go first and suffer from overzealous cheerleading of a particular vaccines efficacy
Given the incident rate and the growing COVID swells in a few european countries (France and Italy especially), the slow vaccination progress, not helped by hesitance over AZ and surprising prevalence of vaccine hesitancy in general, you could just as well argue the opposite. Nations that are overcautious may lose far, far, far, far more lives thanks to covid infections than an extremely rare handful of blood clots which haven't even been tied causally to the vaccine yet. The risk reward narrative on this topic has been really bizarre so far.
>The goal is to keep serious cases to a minimum so they don’t clog the healthcare system...
Reminds me of 2 weeks to flatten the curve. Yet here we are. Why all the sudden are we at risk of clogging the healthcare system with some areas hitting 70%+ adult vaccination rates? Germany already has given out 124,401,062 doses of the vaccine. All I ever see is the goalposts being moved with this stuff.
I have taken the vaccine, but I am hesitant about mandates and vaccine passports.
> Uh, yeah, no. I fully support my country's stance on this. We simply cannot afford to indemnify an multinational company from their own product.
Your choice then. In the EU and NA, wherever nations pride themselves on their vaccination drives, either the makers of the vaccines have been indemnified by law or everyone who wants the vaccine has to sign an indemnification clause before getting the vaccine. In Germany the latter is the case.
It is a highly rational concern to distrust highly experimental vaccines, which these vaccines all are. The question in the risk calculation is, can you afford to position yourself against a means that can lessen the impact of a highly damaging virus? Perhaps individuals should make that choice, if states don't want to.
> In a revision to a technical paper on their methods, researchers cut Germany’s pandemic-related deaths estimate by 37%, pulling its excess death rate below those of the United Kingdom and Spain1.
As a German, this was obvious to me when it happened, but the vaccinism was so deep, that anyone who dared to question the status quo was treated like a traitor.
> Looking at the somewhere like the UK for what would happen, there were very measurable deaths in the <34 group that would occur if a country that did crisis management as (relatively) effectively Denmark opened without vaccination
Your source doesn't show a <34 age group, nor does it differentiate sex. Women have a significantly lower risk than men.
I have looked at data from Germany, which shows 59 deaths of females under 40 since the start of the pandemic:
That translates into a roughly one in 330,000 chance of death from the vaccine, for ages 60 and under.
It is of course difficult to estimate the future risk of COVID infection, but it's not obvious that it outweighs the risk of the vaccine for that particular cohort.
> So the 2 deaths would have to be averaged over additional years of lock down without an exit plan.
This is a false dichotomy. Not everybody needs to be vaccinated to dramatically reduce the risk of COVID infection. In particular, it would be unethical to vaccinate those for which the individual risk of vaccination outweighs the risk of infection.
> Sure, there is no reason not to prioritize mRNA for younger women if it is available, but these botched announcements will kill tens of thousands of young women world wide even if the production is never reduced and the delays in countries like South Africa are short lived.
This is speculation that isn't supported by data.
> I am deeply saddened by the behavior of the US and EU in this regard, it really amounts to a simultaneous false virtue signaling and through snubbing all but the best options, push other nations that don't have priority access to mRNA to now make deadly decisions for some kind of honor that doesn't even make sense.
This sounds rather arrogant and short-sighted. It's likely that at the current rate, deaths among young women attributed to vaccinations would overtake deaths from the illness itself, which would completely destroy trust in the regulatory bodies, causing irreparable damage to all future vaccination campaigns.
> Would excess deaths in summer in 0 - 45 age group, in Europe be compelling or is there some other explanation to those?
I don't know, what figures are you referring to and what do you think those are evidence of?
> For preventing spread ineffectiveness, would Gibraltar being #2 in the World by infection rate while having 99% vaccination be compelling?
Taken in isolation, not particularly, no. What you appear to have there is some vaguely formed speculation.
> For waning hospital and death protection would Israel data be compelling?
Be specific, what claims are you making and what evidence do you think backs them up?
> What about countless anecdotal stories of similar persistent adverse effects and VAERS reports?
Perhaps you could count them, and investigate to understand if the anecdotes and VAERS reports are true or not, and at what rate they occur. VAERS is by design a catch-all and self-reported, so the data there is interesting but not necessarily trustworthy. Anecdotes are not data, after all.
> countries have reached the point where the majority of Covid patients in their ICUs are vaccinated at well below 100% vaccination.
Which countries are you talking about? It's certainly not the case for Germany, and I don't know any other European country for which this would be the case.
> Unbelievably, millions of doses are on track to spoil this month, before they can be administered. The bottleneck is now not manufacturing, it’s not supply, it’s just pure bureaucratic dysfunction and chaos, lack of funding and staff, and a stone-faced unwillingness by governors to deviate from harebrained “plans” and “guidelines” even with their populations’ survival at stake.
Is this really true? In Germany there is currently a big outcry because there are not enough vaccine doses available. While probably unavoidable to some degree it would be a shame if people die because of logistical difficulties.
>Is Austria on a different track when it comes to the epidemic?
Austria and Switzerland have shockingly high vaccine skepticism rates when compared with other advanced European countries like Ireland or Denmark.
I have no explanation for why this just that when they were measuring vaccine skepticism Switzerland and Austria were up there with Romania and Bulgaria and I was spitting out my coffee at the chart.
So it could be N95 masks are effective but other mechanisms are letting down these populations.
> I wish German media were as meticulous about reporting adverse side effects of the vaccines against COVID-19 as they are with reporting about the dangers of COVID-19 itself.
Key data not getting a lot of/(any?) airtime in the mainstream:
And worst of all, all-cause non-Covid mortality is running well above normal in country after country.
And the whole paragraph:
Something is wrong. The promises that the health authorities have made over the last 12 months about the vaccines are not coming true. Despite near-complete levels of adult vaccination in Europe, many countries are seeing skyrocketing Covid cases and deaths. And worst of all, all-cause non-Covid mortality is running well above normal in country after country.
Depends. If AZ is not removed entirely from use but instead only from the most affected group (women under 50), then this can be achieved by shuffling around which group gets which vaccine. So the same number of people will be vaccinated, and vaccination deaths are avoided.
> Only if people (and the media especially) hype up a very small danger to be more than it is.
At least here in Germany, it was mainly the healthcare workers who specifically rejected AZ. Police, fire brigade, kindergarten teachers, etc. were eager to get any vaccine. So simply blaming it on the media is maybe short-sighted, there are other dynamics at play here.
> taking a booster shot and someone in a 3rd world country without access to vaccines is irrelevant
It is in a world with limited production capacity, unless you think improving the odds of survival from 70%->90% in industrialized countries trumps improving 0%->90 in the rest of the planet :
- The US factories are barely getting online.
- 80% of the mRNA vaccines production capacity is still between Switzerland, Belgium, Germany and Spain.
- Viral Vector capacity (non-Sputnik, which Russia licenses freely) is also mostly between Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and the UK, with some precursors in India.
I said within a certain demographic... For old people, the vaccine is obviously worth it. Boys/men from age 10-30, probably not. Hell, a bunch of EU countries literally stopped giving young people the Moderna vaccine:
> The numbers per capita are bound to be worse in Germany and parts the USA, which have lower overall vaccination rates
Germany and the USA have way more critical care beds available per capita than almost anywhere else in the developed world, by some margin, at least based on the figures in this article (the US more than 5x as many as the UK, Germany almost 4.5x)
To a dreadful first-order approximation, shouldn't it be around 5x harder to overwhelm a system which has 5x more capacity?
> refusing to get the vaccine if they hear it's Astra-Zeneca, because of all the overblown nightmarish news around it
Here is a small problem with this that makes me also consider if I want to take a shot with AZ even if I registered for it months ago waiting for my place:
Before EU started discussing the issue with statistical signifiant number of cases of blood clots in vaccinated population UK Reported 5 cases of blot clots in vaccinated population.
After EU talked second time to suspend vaccination with AZ lo and behold UK discovered that it missed in previous months to report 25 more cases.
Now should I trust any of these agencies that they are telling the truth? I am starting not.
But I had a mild COVID and I am sure after experiencing those symptoms that I really want a vaccine. I am not willing to experience a reinfection.
> You really can't see the parallel? "There's data coming in that suggests the AZ vaccine is deadly to a small but significant population, so while we wait for more data, we're going to halt its use".
But there's no data like that. And even preliminary observations estimate danger of causing clotting by AZ at less that is caused by air travel.
> What you've said on the subject sounds very reasonable, but I can't find anywhere else.
I'm sorry to hear that. Could you list exactly which statements I made that tou feel lack scientific backing and I'll try to do my best to find scientific or educational materials on the subject to back them up.
> "Dr. Julian Tang, honorary associate professor and clinical virologist at the University of Leicester, said in a statement that he is "still not yet very convinced by these results" from the study."
I agree that the evidence is not yet as strong that the effect can't be attributed totally to other factors.
It's just strong enough for some people and for some it is not. Only time will tell.
However economic damage from lockdowns doesn't seem to be any more clear cut case when you compare economic impact of pandemic on countries that didn't do a lockdown like Sweden with the countries that did.
> So even if you're aged 12 to 29, if you don't get vaccinated you're gambling at taking away someone else's hospital bed. Which will doom the rest of us.
According to [1] at no point in time since March this year (when they started recording this data) have there been more than 100 hospitalizations in the age group 0-30 in Germany a country with 80+ million inhabitants. If this means doom to all of us I don't know anymore.
You seem to suggest risk-reward analysis be viewed at by the number of deaths.
Germany had to suspend vaccination (temporarily) due to legal reasons and risk of a lawsuit to the state.
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