As can be seen, getting infected is actually not that bad compared to getting the AZ vaccine. In younger age groups the vaccine became hard to recommend contrary to what many claimed and continue to claim on social media.
You also obviously haven’t read case reports for the people that got the blood clots and survived, if you’re only considering deaths as an undesirable outcome. They will have to adjust to significant sequelae for the rest of their lives.
This is an excellent point, and exactly the reason why the UK decided to stop administering the AstraZeneca vaccine to people under 30. Not sure why you're being downvoted.
For people under 30, particularly women, the risk of blood clots from AZ is higher, while at the same time the risk from coronavirus infection is lower. When there are alternative vaccines available with no evidence of similar side effects, it makes sense to temporarily stop administering AZ/J&J to those groups to investigate if there are any risk factors we can use to predict and protect those who may be most vulnerable to side effects. (It has been suggested that young women on certain types of birth control are at highest risk of blood clots after AZ.)
That said, as some have pointed out, the risk of blood clots is still thought to be very low, even for women under 30, and anti-vax groups as well as the vaccine hesitant may see this news as a sign that it's not safe for anyone to take any vaccine. However, I don't think we as a society should actively try to conceal news or research about vaccine safety so that people don't worry. In my opinion, people have a right to know, and efforts to conceal concerning information often backfire, producing more public distrust.
I believe it’s not a lot higher than for the population but it’s a lot higher than the expected risk is for the group that gets the side effects now: young women.
That, together with the fact that this group has minimal risk from the disease means it’s concerning. You don’t want to give someone a vaccine with risks of the same order as the disease.
Giving AZ to 60+ is still almost no concern even with this rate of adverse effects because they show a lower thrombosis risk and of course a massively higher risk of severe illness or death from the disease.
Countries with a mix of AZ and mRNA vaccines like many EU countries can probably use AZ for 60+ and since AZ underdelivers, the rest can take mRNA. Countries that have only or mostly AZ are in a more difficult situation.
I don’t have the exact figures to hand but a rough googling seems to suggest a 1 in 100k risk for clotting in the AZ vaccine for young adults which of course, in many countries has been withdrawn for such rates in those groups.
Denmark reports AZ's serious blood clotting issue as up to 1:40'000.
I will still get vaccinated with it if it's available in our country for me as I think the risk is worth it in my case. But if I was a woman under 60 and especially under 40 I would be hesitant to get vaccinated with AZ and probably wait for other vaccine.
A clarification - this isn't just 'blood clots', it is an extremely rare form of blood clotting that has a 40% risk of death, in a population that has an extremely low risk of death from COVID, where it works out to be 7x as many people have died from this new form of clotting than the general population at large would have expected in the time frame given. Given the numbers we know so far, if you are a young woman who considers herself as having a 10% chance of catching COVID, the 'known' risk of dying from the AZ vaccine is now already higher than your chances of dying from COVID. Specifically, COVID has a 10x higher known death rate than the rate of this complication in the appropriately considered population. A young woman who is working from home and taking precautions could reasonably decide that the AZ vaccine is not worth the risk, without being 'statistically illiterate'.
I think the age distribution is important. The claim is that AZ vaccine causes this rare blood clotting in people below 55 years old. Unfortunately I don't see information about this in the article.
Here in Canada the AZ vaccine was never approved for use in people 65+, and it had nothing to do with the blood clotting issues. The blood clots only seem to affect under-50 people, but it seems like there might be other reasons to avoid giving it to the elderly
If I got the vaccine and a blood clot, I'd want to understand it better. I'd want to understand the numbers at large to see whether it was caused by the vaccine. In the UK, the numbers need to be considered fully:
* 30 million have received the first
* 4 million have received the second
Let's assume that 80% of folk got the AZ vaccine and that there's an equal chance of clot after each vaccine. So we're stating that the chance is 42 / 34 * e6 * 0.8. That means that the chance of it happening (from just those numbers) is 0.000001544117647. Since there are some many zeros, 0.000_001_544_117647. These numbers are tiny.
Now compare that with the chance of death from Covid. For over 50 the chance of death is much higher (calculated by UK population number and deaths in population over over 50 from COVID). When I did the calcs yesterday on the Norwegian (iirc) numbers assuming about 30 per million (higher ratio than the UK numbers), it seemed that for the under 40's the chance of death from vaccine was slightly lower than dying from COVID.
In the UK, COVID deaths might be considered higher than other countries due to differences in the way in which deaths are recorded.
The next question to ask is what the likelihood of a similar blood clot within the general population if they'd not had the vaccine. From what I hear those chances are similarly low. From what I've read from doctors it sounds like the chances are higher than without the vaccine. Some joked that this could therefore be considered an anti-blood clotting medicine.
Next put this into comparison with other medications, such as the contraceptive pill where chance of blots clots is 1:1000.
Relative risk! If over 65 the risk of severe illness with Covid is much increased and with it, the risk of blood clots is very substantial as any search on this topic reveals. Seems the reported cases of blood clots for AstraZenica vaccinations (17 million so far) is 37. Not a difficult risk assessment then unless there are predispossing factors for an individual.
Regarding your third point, you are baking in an assumption that the UK AZ vaccine is the same as the EU vaccine, but they made in different facilities.
There could be a manufacturing issue that causes this. There could be a genetic issue that causes this. There could be a drug interaction issue that causes this. There could be an issue with how the doses are being injected.
Or it could be a total coincidence and these issues were caused by something else.
Regarding your first point, the chances of dying from COVID in the USA if you are under 20 are like 1/100,000 if you have no pre-existing conditions. All people under 40 is probably higher than that, but I wouldn't take that AZ shot if there was a 1/25,000 shot of dropping dead. I certainly wouldn't give it my children. I'm not saying those are the odds of dropping dead from the AZ shot, but if they were, its not worth it for younger people.
I knew someone with a preexisting blood condition who got clotting after taking the vaccine. So for those people the chance is way higher. But the risks for clotting were not as well known at the time as they are now, and she didn't do her own research.
No, other vaccines certainly do not have the same thrombosis risk as AZ. We easily have enough data here that we would have seen that by now. There is the myocarditis risk for the mRNA vaccines, but that is quite a different thing than the thrombosis risk for AZ. The myocarditis is not deadly.
The argument for vaccination of young boys is more complex, and different expert panels have come to different conclusions there. The UK is more of an outlier in this case. There is still enough uncertainty here, especially on the consequences of the infection itself that it's a really difficult decision.
As for point C, there is no reason to believe that Novavax would be safer than the mRNA vaccines. It could be, but there isn't anything inherently superior here that would automatically make it safer.
While both links say the clot risk is about 8 times higher with Corona than either vaccine, the fact that they don't break those results down by age like the original link [0] above seems relevant.
I'm probably going to get flagged/whatever for this, but if there's any chance that I'm going to get blood clots (and potentially die/stroke out/etc. from them) from a vaccine for a virus that has a high percentage survival rate for moderately healthy individuals - I'll pass and either find another one, or wait until the kinks are worked out.
And yes, I did read the article. I'm aware that they said the benefits outweigh the risks, but I'm still not taking any chances.
Interesting, and very concerning if it's true. I was given my first shot of the AZ vaccine on Monday afternoon, so I was aware of the reports of blood clots at the time although only in outline. I just don't understand how come the same reaction hasn't been seen in the millions of people vaccinated with AZ outside Norway (edit - it has been, thanks for the info, none of the articles I've come across properly explained this).
Regardless I don't regret going ahead and getting the jab even for a second. Even if this turns out to be perfectly accurate, it seems to me the risk from the virus is dramatically greater. In fact while I don't want to trivialise what happened to these people, it's awful, I think the biggest concern for me is the millions of people who are not getting vaccinated or have delayed vaccinations due to these concerns, the thousands of them that will end up contracting Covid-19, and the hundreds of them that will end up dead.
This is a real-life example of the runaway railcar switch dilemma. The train car is heading towards a crowd of millions of people and will plough through the middle of them killing many hundreds, or you can throw the switch and divert the railcar so it hits a handful of people prone to the blood clot reaction. A horrible situation to be in. Oh well, I made the choice for myself which group I want to join*.
* Yes, a terrible analogy, but it's the best I could come up with during my lunch break.
It is CVST not just blood clots. There are a lot more blood clots with or without the vaccine. CVST is rare so is the proverbial canary in the coal mine here.
The CVST incidents give a lower bound on risk. The trial data give a rough upper bound on risk (rough due to the small sample size). Knowledge is being refined here. We can't make educated choices without knowledge.
As can be seen, getting infected is actually not that bad compared to getting the AZ vaccine. In younger age groups the vaccine became hard to recommend contrary to what many claimed and continue to claim on social media.
You also obviously haven’t read case reports for the people that got the blood clots and survived, if you’re only considering deaths as an undesirable outcome. They will have to adjust to significant sequelae for the rest of their lives.
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