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Comment by quickthrowman | Hacker News Reader

The risk is quite low for the AZ vaccine (1 death per 2 million), but the 3 that have FDA emergency authorization are even safer (zero known side effect deaths). I wouldn’t take the AZ vaccine unless I was in a high-risk group. Use the AZ vaccine on older people and the others on younger people, the risk calculus changes as you get older.

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> Use the AZ vaccine on older people and the others on younger people, the risk calculus changes as you get older.

I am not sure older people would be too fond of this risk calculus. What about using "the others" on older people, and producing more of "the others" to vaccinate younger people later on?

The risk for the general population of younger people is low, they are not too afraid about the virus, and a potentially large part of them have already gotten COVID and recovered just fine. So there is no hurry in general. From what I read, people who are at risk without being extremely ill in the first place are old people and over-weight people (regardless of age). cf. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.120.051936

Older people are both less at risk from this type of clot (at least based on current data), and much more likely to die from COVID. So the risk of them dying from COVID in the time they have to wait to get an alternative vaccine is almost certain higher than the risk of them dying from a clot from the AZ vaccine.

Over a certain age, the odds of dying are higher from COVID-19 than the AZ vaccine blood clots. Ideally nobody would need to take the vaccine that has a 1 in 2 million deadly side effect, but we’re supply constrained right now.

The numbers from UK diverge a lot of those from Germany. In Germany we had 2.4m first time doses of AZ administered and 9 dead (as of 29th of March), while the UK reported 8 dead from 15m doses (as you stated: 1 in 2m).

The difference is part of the concern in continental Europe.

> Mainland Europe, for example, has given the AstraZeneca vaccine to more people under the age of 60 than the UK, which vaccinated healthcare workers and older people first, using an even split of Pfizer and AstraZeneca shots

from https://www.ft.com/content/d5cd63c6-af01-4d29-a5e5-b69ade4f3...

I would assume as UK starts vaccinating younger people it's likely to show the same impact? (also is continental europe using more AZ vaccines than UK overall?)

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