Norwegian experts say AstraZeneca vaccine is behind the deadly blood clots | Hacker News Reader

Norwegian experts say AstraZeneca vaccine is behind the deadly blood clots

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22 pointsAustin_White30 comments

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Interestingly it seems to mainly affect women. In Germany in over 90% of cases the blood clots occurred in Women.

I wonder if they were also on hormonal birth control, which also has blood clot risks.

Good point, hormonal birth control is very popular here in Germany

Didn't more women than men get vaccinated since more are nurses, teachers etc?

There's more old women than old men, too.

AZ is not given to people over the age of 65 in Germany because their clinical trial only included 18-65 year old patients. It is mainly given to healthcare personal.

TL;DR Lone Norwegian physician proclaims he’s pretty sure there’s no other link to blood clots, so it must be the AZ vaccine. Flying in the face of the European Medical Agency[1], the World Health Organisation and the UK’s medicines regulator.

[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-56440139

This - it’s Andrew Wakefield all over again. Evidence based medicine does not care about the opinion of individuals, and not should you.

Last March, a family friend was in ICU due to Covid. They were given heparin shots in hospital and sent home later and told to take baby aspirin. So it seems Covid itself may causes blood clotting. Is it surprising that the vaccines may as well?

https://www.webmd.com/lung/news/20201105/researchers-say-asp...

Let's just switch to another one.. J&J perhaps. AZ is not very effective anyway especially against some of the new strains.

Thats not so easy -- vaccine shortfalls are very real problems. In many cases AZ is the only option.

AZ is actually more effective than J&J, was this ironic?

I think they are referring to the tests in South Africa on young people that show it has very low effectiveness against the variant that is prevalent there:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2021/03/astrazen...

According to the just finished EMA press conference, incidents of blood clots is lower among people vaccinated with the AZ vaccine than the general population.

Boy I bet they are regretting selling the vaccine at cost considering all the BS being thrown at them.

You forgot to put "at cost" in quotes.

So what? Find out which contraindications there are and then no longer use it for people that are suspectible to those problems.

Vaccinating with AZ is much more useful than it is dangerous. By several orders of magnitude.

> So what? Find out which contraindications there are and then no longer use it for people that are suspectible to those problems.

It's not that simple. You can be an apparently healthy individual with some undiagnosed condition that makes you prone to clots.

Nothing is that simple. We are complicate biological machines. This case clearly shows that.

The problem is if you don't use the vaccine, you won't find out what problems there are. We are talking about single digits of cases for more than 1 million vaccinated persons.

Whereas in the UK, they vaccinated even more people and have apparently no deaths.

>The problem is if you don't use the vaccine, you won't find out what problems there are.

Is that true? It's not like the brain barrier defect injured by the nasal swab, which could be detected ahead of time?

For rare conditions that only affect one person in a million, you are very unlikely to find out about in the usual clinical trials.

That's just a statistical fact. You can reduce that risk with all the testing facilities we have available to us but every vaccine that is approved for humans has already run that course.

I don't care about trials or aggregate risk. If I might be individually likely to be injured by a vaccine or nasal swab, it's irresponsible to the point of harm for doctors not to make available ways to avoid that.

That's their oath, not statistics.

To put it into perspective, the risk of getting killed as a pedestrian in the US is more than twice as likely as the German numbers for the AZ vaccine (which has a bias towards middle aged women and are completely different than the UK numbers, so we already know that we don't have the whole picture). There were 20 deaths per 1 million people in the US in 2019.

Every time you stand up, there's a chance something bad might happen. Likewise with any medical procedure. Of course the doctors are trying to minimize the risks but if you don't take the vaccine, you take the risk of getting infected.

Life is just not riskless. There are no certainties.

Evaluating the risk of individual actions shouldn't be done this way. It is bizarre to argue about how rare a bad effect is when a disorder can be detected ahead of time.

There is a certainty that this attitude is killing people.

That's not true. We don't know which condition triggers this effect. Remember, the UK data doesn't show this effect.

It's not known ahead of time who is susceptile to this effect.

It still can't even be ruled out if this is just a statistical anomaly. That's somewhat unlikely though but we just don't know which precondition is increasing the risk.

In an ideal situation we would suspend vaccinating with AZ but it's also a fact that not vaccinating would be putting more people at risk. Currently, there are not enough alternatives around to do otherwise.

>>Vaccinating with AZ is much more useful than it is dangerous. By several orders of magnitude.

You are right! But the human factor is important to consider here. People aren't machines that will bend over for the collective good of the society. It's important that people's trust in vaccines and the approval process is maintained even at the cost of a slight delay. There are half a dozen vaccine makers who can step up to make up the shortfall.

The vaccine race reminds me of iOS updates: best to wait a bit before you get it, just in case bugs need to be worked out.

That's my plan. As a non high-risk individual who works from home, after discussing this with my doctor I intend to a) wait as long as possible before taking a COVID19 vaccine and b) if possible choose a non-mRNA vaccine (so probably J&J's given that I'm in the US, as opposed to Moderna's or Pfizer's).

Until your comment it hadn't occurred me that this is consistent with my approach to OS updates. I typically upgrade major MacOS versions just before the next one comes out, so the point release is typically .6. Having the current major iOS release is more important for app compatibility, but even there I wait until at least the first point release is out.

What risks do you or your doctor see with a mRNA vaccine?

Its novelty. Were there a longer history of mRNA vaccines, or had the COVID19 ones had the normal vaccine development/testing time, I would likely feel differently. My doctor (who has already received a vaccine; not sure which one) more or less told me that were he not working in healthcare he would, like me, wait.

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