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Comment by libertine | Hacker News Reader

You're missing the point. This is an anomaly.

It's not about the "oh it's worth the risk compared to COVID 19". If it's a side effect it wasn't spotted in the trials, why was that?

It's not a side effect? It was a problem in production? What problem? Was is tampered with or was an accident? What failed in QA to let that batch come to the public? Was is a storage problem that compromised the batch quality? Was it while in transport or in the local hospital?

You talk about this like background noise. It's not. It should be investigated.

It's good that this is happening, because it shows regulators are doing their job. This is what builds trust in vaccines, not disregarding odd occurrences because they seem to have no "statistical relevance". That's just ignorance talking.

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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 vaccines and medicines.

People need to feel safe, and to know that regulators are not sleeping on their job. It's not a bureaucratic job, but that they are actively looking at data and reports from doctors.

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.

The problem is that it's starting to look more and more like a production problem and a bad batch, and you shouldn't be vaccinated with a product that probably should have failed QA.

It's not bureaucratic ass-covering, it's literally the protocol that's in place and has worked to keep populations safe.

>250 miles of driving gives you a one in a million chance of death. This vaccine is safer than that.

Again you're missing the point. The correct analogy would be: driving on a car that randomly combusts, or has faulty breaks, due to bad QA. And this actually happens/happened, that's why some cars are pulled from the market to be fixed when such things happen. Doesn't matter if it has happened on 1 or 2 cars, it shouldn't happen. Want another analogy?

Want another example? The Boing 737 Max.

You should only be allowed to use products that are working as expected, not faulty products. Specially not medicines and vaccines, that could blow up the trust on regulators and the vaccines.

The alternative to a car with bad brakes or a plane with design flaws is another car or another plane. The alternative to a covid vaccine is that you get covid. Even for young and healthy people, that can mean debilitating long-term illness.

There is no safe option here. We have to think like we are in war time, not peace time. Allowing people with informed consent to take this vaccine will save far more lives than banning everyone from taking it.

>The alternative to a covid vaccine is that you get covid. Even for young and healthy people, that can mean debilitating long-term illness.

Well that's arguable, I haven't had covid yet, and I don't plan on getting it. You had plenty of countries that handled covid without vaccines - we are where we are because western governments refused to take specific measures to control de pandemic (but this is another subject). So the alternative would be get a different vaccine.

Neither me EMA, or any regulator are advocating for not being vaccinated, I don't get where you're getting that from. The alternative to this vaccine is other vaccines, in EU alone 4 vaccines are approved and more are to come. Even AZ vaccine isn't excluded what so ever - they are investigating the potential cause.

>Allowing people with informed consent to take this vaccine will save far more lives than banning everyone from taking it.

Thankfully we have regulators that prevent such behavior. If there's a QA issue no one should be vaccinated with the batches affected by that, because proper QA seem to be without any of this reactions.

No one is saying side effects should not be investigated. The question is whether the vaccine administration should be halted in the meantime, and that would be determined by the risk/reward of preventing covid deaths.

Just like I trust the regulators for vaccine approval, I trust them in the decision of stopping the administration of a vaccine to further investigate the problem. This goes together.

It's not a political decision no matter how many people try to spin this. This is the outcome of doctors reporting an anomaly to a regulator. The system is working, and this should give you reassurance, not doubt about the consequences of stopping a vaccine.

I'm pretty sure they know the consequences of this setback, so for them to stop it it's because something is not right.

  "It's not a political decision"

It likely is, though.

From the perspective of the regulators, there are asymmetric personal consequences.

If they make a decision that leads to 50 clotting deaths but saves 5000 people from COVID as a counterfactual, their head is on a chopping block because those 5000 foregone deaths are invisible but the 50 deaths are visible.

If they make a decision to halt the vaccine distribution and this kills an extra 5000 people - well that's no problem because they were just being careful.

Society has set up a political situation where there is literally only one choice that absolves the bureaucrats from a negative personal outcome. Of course they're going to go that route.

Personal incentives are incredibly powerful drivers of behavior, whatever the publicly stated reasons for an action may happen to be.

It may be the case that they've made the right decision, but we can't assume that it was for the right reasons.

You could use the same arguments and mindset when you're an antivaxx. Vaccines can't be a holy cow that gets defended no matter what. It's always interesting that people who claim to not trust big business big pharma somehow defend everything vaccine related to death. Regulators halted it snd wait for new information to come in, that is how it's supposed to be.

Perhaps individuals should have a say as to which risk is preferable to them. As it is, the antivaxxer gets to choose not get vaccinated, but the provaxxer must wait for someone elses approval.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the decision, I don't know enough about the clotting data to do so, and I can certainly see the necessity in preserving the public's faith in vaccines.

I'm more saying that the incentives of regulators/politicians aren't always aligned with public health, since the decision that protects public health and the decision that protects careers aren't always the same thing.

Then it's not political reasons, it's simply self interest.

I like to believe that these institutions - regulators - know better then to cover their asses, because if that was protocol until now for sure there would be a lot of problems with medicines and vaccines.

At leas the European ones (the cases I know) seem to have been pretty competent on their jobs, so I doubt that is a motivation.

> we can't assume that it was for the right reasons

But what are “the right reasons”? This one is a moral dilemma that has no solution. “OK, let’s kill these 50 people so that that those 5000 could live.” No one in their right mind can propose that.

That decisions is made all the time with drugs that have side effects. Setting the speed limits also is a balance between a deaths and convenience

The thing is that this isn't reported even as a side effect, that's why there's an ongoing investigation.

> This is an anomaly.

This is not established at all.

Overall the number of blood clots observed is actually less than expected, with an incidence lower than in the general population (i.e. without vaccine at all). My source is BBC News this evening.

This is old news. As of today, there is a suspicious rise in a specific form of blood clotting in Germany, hence the suspension.

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