Looks like this may be a bit more relevant than many of the snarky comments would suggest - the relevant German authority on this said that they have seen a unexpected increase in a specific type of blood clotting issue that usually is very rare: https://www.pei.de/DE/newsroom/hp-meldungen/2021/210315-voru...
It's not a medically reasonable response that solicits snarky remarks, it's the complete retardation of the official covid response so far, and even reasonable decisions just are landing on a pile of steaming crap now.
- billions per week of half assed lockdown vs a few billion more for high quality timeley vaccine delivieries of the good stuff --- of course they chose the lockdown
- open schools as if nothing happens vs using UV-based air filtering machines and so on as a minimum level of precaution --- of course they choose to open schools with classrooms some of which even don't have windows that can be opened properly
- governing party members of parliament scamming the public out of money by selling overly expensive, low quality masks
- minister of health busy sueing newspapers for disclosing prices on his million dollar real estate purchases vs minister of health actually being busy 24/7 with fighting the crisis
the list goes "on and on and on", these are just the most popular ones right now. It's just a dumpster fire at this point and the positives will not be recognized divorced from said pile of crap.
Let's not forget that the German government resorts to "alternative facts" since the pandemic began just as they see fit. When we had nor masks available last march, they said "masks are useless" two months later they were mandatory "because they are the best thing we have". Recently, a post by the government on Facebook said "AstraZeneca gave us one of the best vaccines ever" just as people started to cancel their appointments when they saw that their vaccine was going to be from AstraZeneca. Now they pause vaccination with it. Yeah.
I'm not aware what exactly the German government has said in the past w.r.t mask usage. However, governments claiming mask usage was not required near the start of the pandemic followed by them later requiring people to use masks was actually an understandable decision on their part from what I've understood of the situation as it unveiled.
At the beginning of the pandemic, it was believed that the virus was using droplet transmission alone. In such a scenario, surgical masks, for the general public, would only be required in people who were sick to prevent transmission and N95 masks would primarily be required by health care workers. Considering the mask shortages faced in many countries at the time due to panic buying, the communications made by governments to the public w.r.t the benefits of masks make sense from a cost benefit perspective since it would guarantee that the people who needed the masks the most (medical workers and sick people) would receive them and reduce the spread of the virus.
Fast forward 2 months later, airborne transmission as well as asymptomatic transmission of the virus were both confirmed independently in several labs. This would mean that the prior strategy of only using surgical masks on sick people wouldn't really work well anymore. In the meanwhile, the availability of masks was much higher due to increased production. Hence, to reduce the risks of airborne and asymptomatic transmissions, governments released advisories asking all people to wear masks.
Governments didn't say that a mask wasn't required. They said masks didn't help (presumably to prevent a run on them). It's definitely an understandable decision, but there's a big problem with it.
When officials start doing this, you have to play a sort of game where you try to figure out why they said something and what it signifies. You have to try to divine the state of reality and figure out what to do based on what you think they were trying to get people to do (there's a lot of uncertainty in this).
By that point, by definition, trust in the person (and probably the institution) is gone, and we don't have a lot of trust in institutions to spare.
Indeed. I'm quite furious that my government (Finland) ordered such a "mask assessment" from a retired professor, in order to reduce the political pressure caused by PPE shortages.
Now anti-maskers and other covid deniers are citing that report: "don't do anything, even the government research says it is useless".
I was well aware even by March that masks were the way to go. It was a simple lie, by e.g. the Surgeon General, in order to try to save masks (while they didn't even start ramping production of them!)
But of course if a government official lies to you about your own health risks then that has very high costs, much higher than whatever masks were saved. They could have just said "masks are useful, but you need to be trained to use them correctly, they are difficult to manipulate, etc. and they are very scarce so sadly let's stay home and let doctors and nurses use them".
I might sound as if I'm upset at that, because I REALLY am. I hate when governments lie, even if they are "white lies", and I hate when they treat their constituents as kids.
The lesson from 1918 for public health is that if you lie to or mislead the public once, even if by accident, you have reduced credibility in the future and are less likely to have the public listen to you. The authorities didn't learn this lesson and instead misled the public for 2 months, then did a 180 and expected people to blindly listen to them again.
As a citizen, would you trust the government if they did yet another 180, after demonstrating to you 2x that they didn't actually know what they were talking about?
> As a citizen, would you trust the government if they did yet another 180, after demonstrating to you 2x that they didn't actually know what they were talking about?
One of the many things that I've learned from this pandemic is that for better or worse, the answer to this question is emphatically yes for a significant percentage of the population. Many folks will indeed blindly trust whatever they are currently being told by people they believe are authorities or experts. At times this may be a good thing, but I personally lean toward thinking it's not good overall. And as you correctly point out, another big chunk of people will understandably lose faith in institutions and authorities that either were wrong or simply lied, which I'd argue likely causes significant long term damage to the healthy functioning of a society.
Even if it was believed that sick people wearing mask would be enough, there will be asymptomatic infections as well as the social stigma of wearing a mask if only sick people do it. The only way that enough people wear masks is to have everyone do it.
> Considering the mask shortages faced in many countries at the time due to panic buying, the communications made by governments to the public w.r.t the benefits of masks make sense from a cost benefit perspective since it would guarantee that the people who needed the masks the most (medical workers and sick people) would receive them and reduce the spread of the virus.
The government lying to its people is never acceptable. Also, there was plenty of time to ramp up mask production when the virus was spreading in China and later Italy. Taiwan did this successfully, why did supposedly more developed countries fail so badly at ensuring adequate mask supply?
Truth does not work that way. If you have to prioritize masks for something, regulate that market down - by simply making it a crime to deal with them without offering them to the government first.
And still nobody bothered to check what kind of trend-changes are visible in the epidemiological curves around the time of masking.
People never look at "date of death" or "infection date" all they care about is "reporting date" - and every newspaper out there will show you the effects of government measures on "reporting".
> When we had nor masks available last march, they said "masks are useless" two months later they were mandatory "because they are the best thing we have"
Wow, this is exactly how the masks thing played out in Poland.
I wasn't aware that this "makes are useless" followed by "masks are mandatory" (with Poland together with a ban on selling them on the biggest platform, big like Amazon is in the US - Allegro).
And now here in Poland we are at the "AstraZeneca vaccine is safe" and we are vaccinating with it, I wonder how many EU countries still use it besides Poland.
Pretty much the same thing happened here in New Zealand too, FWIW. I understand it was WHO providing this advice (i.e. no evidence regarding the effectiveness of masks etc) at the time so perhaps the German government is not entirely at fault. I know that once the WHO changed their tune (following research comparing countries who had policies on masks and those who didn't) the New Zealand government eventually got round to making masks mandatory but even then only in certain places.
Wow, same in Switzerland. They told people to keep using fully packed trains and buses and that masks weren't necessary. Couple weeks later, when masks were well available they suddenly made it mandatory to wear them on public transport.
To be fair, country borders in the EU are not that useful for containing anything. Earlier and better travel restrictions - both cross countries and between different areas in one country - would have been useful though.
Every country in the world except South Korea, HK, China and Taiwan failed to recognise the importance of masks at the beginning only to later change their minds.
No. They willfully misrepresented their importance so that civilians didn’t buy them before the hospitals could. They were unprepared to respond to the increase in demand due to their complete incompetence. Anyone using a shred of logic saw through the “masks don’t work” insanity.
> - billions per week of half assed lockdown vs a few billion more for high quality timeley vaccine delivieries of the good stuff --- of course they chose the lockdown
This is not the issue. A few billion would not have magically solved the problems with vaccine deliveries. The EU has contracts with pharmaceutical companies which these companies are not honoring sometimes intentionally so.
AstraZeneca for example doesn't have the production capacity to supply what they promised to the EU even if the Belgian site was working properly. That's the result of the EU audit. These companies are betting that the consequence of them not fullfiling their contractual obligation will be insignificant compared to their benefits. As these companies remain hugely profitable, their production issue is not linked to difficulty accessing capital. It is naive to assume things would have gone differently if the EU was paying more. It would just have meant more profits for them.
The heart of the issue is that contraty to the USA or China the EU is weak so companies don't hesitate trampling it. If a Chinese company did to China what AstraZeneca is doing to the EU, the CCP would take control of it and its CEO would never be seen again. Meanwhile, the USA has little qualm using its legal system to punish companies defying the state to much. Congressional inquiries are not fun.
Your claims are off-topic and irrelevant with respect to the safety of this vaccine.
Any potential safety issues with vaccines must be investigated, otherwise there will be a huge problem with trust in vaccines and in the regulator. There's already a huge problem with vaccine skepticism, and vaccine fanatics are making things worse.
Suspending vaccinations for side effects that happen in 1 in 300000 cases is not medically reasonable. Even if all these cases are due to the vaccine, not vaccinating gives a worse result than vaccinating so it’s the dumb thing to do.
Which is what WHO and EMA are saying. But now that there’s panic, they’re not relevant anymore.
When was the WHO ever relevant wrt Covid 19 though? Their advice has been contradictory. They gave guidance before knowing whether masks would help, and later had to change it. They gave guidance about the transmissibility of the virus, and then changed it. Not knowing whether something is true does not stop them from speaking with authority. To put icing on the cake, they perform a puppet show for the CCP and then declare their confidence in understanding the origin of the virus. They say a lot of definitive things without knowing anything definitive.
I'm very disappoint finding out that the minister of health is just a lobbyist with no medical background. He seems to care a lot about suing people who talk about his villa than doing actual work.
This is the best time for politicians to steal money, as people are unable to go to the street to do demonstrations.
Polititians are stuck between trying to make the free-for-all phase as long as possible, but still look as though they did everything to help, so that they can win the next election.
Compared to the status of 11.03.2021, additional cases (as of Monday, 15.03.2021) have now been reported in Germany. In the analysis of the new data status, the experts of the Paul Ehrlich Institute now see a striking accumulation of a special form of very rare cerebral vein thrombosis (sinus vein thrombosis) in conjunction with a deficiency of blood platelets (thrombocytopenia) and bleeding in temporal proximity to vaccinations with the COVID-19 vaccine AstraZeneca.
Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)
Yes, cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, exceedingly rare condition in the general population. It can cause permanent neurological disability and death if not diagnosed and treated.
Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis presents with nonspecific symptoms (eg headaches). It can only be diagnosed with cerebral imaging of specific modalities (CT or MR brain venogram, expensive and specialised tests). From speaking to colleagues in the UK, their hospital system is quite overwhelmed and doctors are repurposed outside their field (eg surgeons looking after internal medicine patients). It is quite possible in the throes of a pandemic to be underestimating the incidence of this condition in the UK.
> The EMA has said that as of March 10, a total of 30 cases of blood clotting had been reported among close to 5 million people vaccinated with the AstraZeneca shot in the European Economic Area, which links 30 European countries.
"The decision today is purely precautionary..." given this level of signal. We don't have details on the age groups involved and the normal rates expected but I can hazard a Fermi Estimate that the risk is minuscule compared to COVID-19 itself. I look forward to seeing the actual data in coming days/weeks. Precaution without downside is acceptable; this is not one of those cases, IMO. YMMV.
> the risk is minuscule compared to COVID-19 itself
You don't know this at all - we don't know what age groups are affected here, and COVID is pretty much negligible in many younger age groups. It's best to wait for more data to come in before drawing any conclusions.
The risk *of death* from COVID is pretty negligible for some age groups. The biggest confusion of this whole situation is we've fixated on CFR numbers as a measure of risk.
Risks of long-term consequences don't seem to be all that low.
I haven't seen anything that indicates that the risk of long-term consequences is significantly elevated above other viral diseases. There is a condition (which we know too little about, and which - as one of the few good outcomes of the COVID situation - is now actually getting some attention) that can lead to fatigue and other symptoms after fighting off a viral infection, but it's not unique to COVID.
A year ago there was a lot of noise about things like heart issues induced by COVID, which turned out to be mostly statistical errors in the papers that made the claims.
A lot of people (often people who never actually had a positive test) also claim to suffer from various mental impairments after their COVID infections, and some newspaper ran an article saying that some of these symptoms were alleviated after the people were given anxiety medication. Go figure ...
There is no evidence of the link between sleeping sickness, EL, and Spanish flu.
> Since encephalitis lethargica’s (EL) prevalence in the 1920s, epidemiological and clinical debate has persisted over whether EL was caused by, potentiated by, or merely coincident with the Spanish influenza pandemic. Epidemiologic analyses generally suggest that the disorders were coincidental.
There is nothing to play down. More than a year into the pandemic are there is still no evidence of long-term damage except in rare cases. Evidence of inflammation in monkeys does not qualify, before you ask.
Someone very close to me is a “long hauler” and the quality of life effects have been horrible. A young and healthy person, now dealing with fatigue, blood clotting, and a host of other uncomfortable and troubling issues. Throughout, medical professionals have been struggling to give people like this answers as to what exactly is happening to them — and the common refrain is “we don’t knew enough about it yet, but we’re seeing a lot of this.”
I’ll let the eventual studies give the percentages. But my (personal, non professional) take on this is that long-hauler experiences are a LOT more common then people realize, have been fairly ignored while people have fixated on the death count, and have big possible implications for quality of life for younger, otherwise healthy people.
Agree fully, although even the mortality numbers far outweigh the thrombosis incidence!
Long covid:
> Estimates of the number of people with long COVID vary widely. In July, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in five patients 18–34 years of age without chronic medical conditions and with a positive outpatient test had not fully recovered by 2–3 weeks after testing, and a research center in Rome found that 87% of 143 patients reported persistence of at least one symptom 60 days after onset of the disease. According to a preprint published in October that has not yet undergone peer review, 24% of 233 patients still had symptoms at 90 days after infection. Data from a smartphone app, as reported by the COVID Symptom Study, showed that one in ten patients with COVID-19 have symptoms after 3 weeks. Given the scale of the pandemic, if even only a small percentage of the tens of millions of infected people worldwide develop long COVID, a staggeringly large number of people would need long-term follow-up and treatment.
> COVID is pretty much negligible in many younger age groups
"Paediatricians in Israel, which has surged ahead in vaccinating its adult population, reported a sharp rise in covid-19 infections among young people, with more than 50 000 children and teens testing positive in January—more than Israel saw in any month during the first and second waves."
Susceptible to infection, absolutely, but are they suffering severe symptoms or dying in large numbers? No.
A single metric (e.g. positive tests) is not enough to assess any severity here, and even those metrics come with caveats because all of our methods of determining them are imprecise.
> Moreover, the database is not a representative sample of the sars-cov-2-positive population. Because it only contains records from people who have interacted with a medical service provider, it excludes those who weather the disease at home without medical assistance.
This will exclude the vast majority of people in younger age groups who were affected. Serology studies have shown us that in many densely populated places infection rates have been far into the double-digit percentages - if this statistic was true in the way you interpreted it, we would know that by now.
i.e. if a very large number of young people get sick, there will be sufficient severe cases among their population to fill up intensive care beds and there will also be many people with sequelae.
But in Germany and Europe children can't get vaccinated and by the time young adults can it will be September anyway.
Then why not temporarily suspend vaccinations only for those under 40? Or let people have a choice in determining whether the risk is worth it for them.
I would love to have a choice in determining whether the various risks are worth it for me, but my government has insisted on shutting all "non-essential" businesses, and only lifted a 3-month "stay at home" order last week.
That’s not really the same thing since an individual who, for example, goes to large gatherings also endangers others by making essential activities like going to the grocery store more dangerous for everyone. Besides that, wider spread of the virus increases the odds of dangerous mutations that make the vaccine less effective or the illness more severe. More spread also risks hospital overloads, which will hurt the medical outcomes of everyone. Going out beyond essential needs hurts everyone.
On the other hand, getting a potentially faulty vaccine would seem to mostly only be a risk to the individual, although I suppose there is some risk of overwhelming hospitals still.
Please just stay home for a few more months so this shit can finally fucking end. It’s already been a year.
Edit: an important factor, too, is that understanding the potential risks of the AZ vaccine is hard, and the average person may not expected to fully understand them. Right now, it seems like even the authorities don’t understand them.
How exactly will staying at home "for a few more months" stop a virus mutating forever? It's not that bad, we have to live with it. Viruses mutate all the time.
I'm not sure what your point is with the apparent difficulty of understanding the risks of a new vaccine. Are you saying "it's hard, so just trust what the authorities tell you"?
In a few more months everyone will be vaccinated, significantly limiting the spread, slowing mutation.
To be clear, we’re talking about the risk of the AZ vaccine specifically. It seems like there might be something specifically wrong with it. Ceding approval authority to bodies like the FDA is how medicine is regulated all over the world. That’s how literal snake oil is blocked from sale. Among other things, it prevents desperate patients from making uninformed, dangerous, and expensive treatment decisions. The average person really isn’t equipped to read a medical study and adequately interpret the results. This information isn’t even at the maturity level of a study, and the risk is that people hurt themselves and undermine the confidence in this vaccine and others.
That's nice, and I suppose everyone entering and leaving the country will need vaccine passports. It's as if everything that we were told would never happen, is going to happen. "A few weeks to flatten the curve", and now we are swallowing the idea of 100% vaccination and associated papers.
As for your comments on regulation - yes, that is correct, which is why I was surprised when I got so much flak for pointing out that, at least in the UK, regulatory shortcuts were taken to rush the approval of Covid vaccines.
I guess I don’t remember things the same. In my state, the most extreme restrictions (basically, everything is closed that isn’t remote or essential work) were lifted after a bit. I don’t recall ever being under the impression that restrictions would ever be completely lifted until the vaccine was rolled out. I recall at the time there being a lot of worry about how long that would take. I also don’t recall anything about vaccine passports, other than China doing it. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention to the rhetoric surrounding that.
There were shortcuts taken in all countries to get the vaccines out. In the US, there is no FDA approved COVID vaccine. Every “approved” vaccine is actually under an emergency use authorization.
COVID isn't the only health threat around, and the response is absolutely not proportional anymore.
FWIW, the LCD of most relevant studies show that maybe banning large gatherings is useful, whereas all other measures we've invented in the meantime have dubious efficacy at best - and extremely high costs.
There are plenty of places in the world that didn't implement the "fight COVID at any cost" policies and they're doing just fine. Trust me on that, I live in one of them.
No matter who you are, vaccination is safer than catching covid. The vaccines are designed and tested for safety; covid gains evolutionary fitness from making you sick. As a result, the risks from vaccination are orders of magnitude lower, no matter what the covid risk is.
(Edit: Deleted second paragraph that wasn’t clearly worded.)
Your claim is false, because for some (many?) people this disease doesn't seem to cause even mild symptoms. It's always possible that some terrible consequence will only be visible years later, like for Measles, but we don't know that.
Without a crystal ball, there’s no way to know ahead of time who’s going to have an asymptomatic case. If there were a way to predict it with high accuracy, it’d be a different story, but for now that’s science fiction.
It is somewhat true, but the virus doesn't know that, and there isn't a strong evolutionary pressure to make covid less lethal.
Covid is transmitted mostly during its mild phase, it only becomes severe a week later, if you are unlucky. If you are lucky, you clear off the infection and gain relatively strong immunity. For the virus, both scenarios are similar.
The only thing is that if it was just a cold, we wouldn't bother with preventive measures and the virus would spread more easily. However, when both the lethal and nonlethal variants are present, the nonlethal variant doesn't have an advantage since we treat everyone the same way, so it is unlikely for the nonlethal variant to take over on its own. At least not on a short timescale.
The solution is to create our own nonlethal variant, also known as a vaccine. Well, vaccines don't spread, I guess we could make a vaccine that spreads but "what could possibly go wrong..."
1. If holding off AstraZeneca vaccine does not affect vaccination rate during the investigation period, it is a prudent thing to do.
2. If vaccine rate is expected to drop, number of expected increase in death per day due to covid vs blood clog should be compared, if we were to minimize short term death.
3. More concerning is unknown effect that could take a long time to materialize. This is a tough call to make since any effect is only theoretical at this point.
Vaccination rate in Germany will drop considerably while the hold is in place, at least 20%, if not more. I don't know the exact numbers, but vaccination is quite blocked on vaccine supply at the moment.
This isn't really true for the AstraZeneca vaccine, though. There's supply, but people don't seem to trust it and it's just sitting on the shelves because even when people book an appointment they don't show up. I'm sure the number of vaccinations _will_ drop, because it's one of the only few vaccines being distributed, but I doubt it will be as high as you mention here.
There have been some delays due to the fact that initially it was only used for people under 65 and only medical personal was qualified to be vaccinated with it - all other vaccinations were limited to 80 and above. But by now the AZ vaccine is used for all age groups and the vaccination has been offered to wider groups. Now, vaccination is mostly limited by availability.
> This isn't really true for the AstraZeneca vaccine, though.
It is (or was), AZ was to supply EU with 500M vaccines this year but changed that to 200M.
EU got really served on the vaccine front, UK got more from AZ, US got more from Pfizer/Moderna (both have 3x more vaccinated than EU). And each transport that we ought to get is smaller or dalayed.
I wouldn't be surprised if governments there blocked some of the vaccine export.
I really hope that there will be a backslash for those companies for not fulfilling their obligations. If not now then later when there is a race for subsidies for "free" prescription medications.
don't discount trust in the vaccination process, it might be better to visible respond to anomalies to signal that the system that makes sure vaccinations are safe actually works.
British Columbia's Dr. Bonnie Henry discusses [1] (5min YouTube clip up until 28m37s) the decision process surrounding Adverse Events Following Immunization (AEFIs) [2] within the context of the EMA decision involving the AstraZeneca vaccine. Her explanations tend to mirror her refrain "Be Kind, Be Calm, Be Safe".
For those jurisdictions like the UK, India, and Canada that continue recommending AstraZeneca, I'd suggest that COVID-19 vaccines are like beer; the best one is the one in front of you.
It's 0.0015% compared to 4%, so at least a 2.6·1e3 difference. Given less than 0.004% chance to catch the disease in my city, the odds are 10 fold in favour of not getting vaccinated. I'll still get vaccinated regardless, because I am sick and tired of this pandemic and want to go on vacation instead of into an another lockdown this year.
The 4% deaths are from covid-19, not from the vaccines. 3.4% is the WHO global estimate if you want to be more precise and 2.5% in my country as of today.
The 0.0015% is the known rate of blood clots from all the AZ doses on the continent according to what the GP has reported and RFI has confirmed the same numbers today (30 cases in 5M doses but it's not clear how many have died and why).
So 0.4 death rate times 0.004 chance to get covid in my area equals 0.0016 chanches to get covid and die which is one point higher than the chances of getting blood clots from the vaccine. Yeah, I botched the last product, so it's actually about the same risk figure, but the benefits of getting vaccinated outweigh the risks and the allegedly faulty vaccine batch has already been halted anyway. I have acquaintances that were vaccinated with the allgedly faulty batch AVB2856 before it was halted and they're doing just fine.
Got you, thanks. (Side-note, I wish it were easier to transmit simple models like this as part of discourse).
The 0.0015 risk of death seems high. Where are you getting that from?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-german... gives "The EMA has said that as of March 10, a total of 30 cases of blood clotting had been reported among close to 5 million people vaccinated with the AstraZeneca shot in the European Economic Area, which links 30 European countries."
But if you want to take the German numbers, 3 deaths out of 1.6m vaccines:
3/1,600,000 = 0.000001875 (In percent, 0.0001875%) which is 0.125 of your figure.
And the OP gives a base rate of "two to five cases per 1 million individuals per year" for context; we need to subtract out the base rate from the observed deaths too (because obviously the base rate of this condition occurs regardless of whether you take the vaccine).
There's a mistake on my part, the risk of getting blood clots, not death, is actually even lower, 30/5/1e-6 = 6·1e-6, not 0.0015.
The base rate is per year, the AZ vaccine was used for about 3 mo in the EU. That leaves us with a base rate of 0.5 to 1.25 cases per million per 3 mo, so using your numbers:
1.875 - (0.5…1.25) = 1±0.375
deaths per million if we were to keep the inputs unchanged?
The first cell is the model I was building, I finally got it into reasonable shape. It comes from the published national statistics for death rates. (Comments welcome, I just sketched this to help me think about the numbers here. No claim on this actually being right.)
The second cell is my attempt at rendering your initial calc, though I've not folded in the base rate changes. We can go into the weeds there but looking at the results I don't think we need to; my calcs naively attribute all the blood clot cases to the vaccine and still give COVID as being worse than the vaccinations by a factor of 400-800.
The way you're thinking about base rates sounds right to me though, and it does sound like the best guess is we're at something like 4x above base rate.
Given that I implemented my model with a completely different approach and we're both within a factor of 2 (if I've rendered yours correctly) I think we're in the right ballpark here, at least for "Fermi calculation" level of completeness.
Surely more people will die from COVID than from blood clotting, due to this delay?
Or perhaps not, given that 2020 deaths in Germany were 985,145, only 4.85% higher than 2019, and only 3.2% higher than 2018 (and so basically in line with what we would expect from an aging society).
> Or perhaps not, given that 2020 deaths in Germany were 985,145, only 4.85% higher than 2019, and only 3.2% higher than 2018 (and so basically in line with what we would expect from an aging society).
Are we still having this debate.... Of course the overall mortality didn't change much, people stayed at home for literally 75% of the year.
Do you have the split stats for accidental deaths, road deaths, disease related deaths, &c. ? Because otherwise it's meaningless. We can put everyone in an artificial coma and get as little death per year as possible, it isn't a really interesting metric without the context.
You can check overall deaths for Europe on Euromomo.
It shows that despite everything we've done we've had significant more deaths in certain age groups.
You seem to be genuinely curious. For those who want to scoff it off: look at those numbers and consider the fact that these numbers are what we see after a war-sized effort to prevent more damage: in most populations only a few percent have been hit.
At the moment this epidemic runs unchecked a death rates also increase even more as it easily overwhelms even European health care if it isn't kept down.
And no, it is not just the elderly: my age group (40+) and above are all at risk.
> and consider the fact that these numbers are what we see after a war-sized effort to prevent more damage
Which doesn't seem to have worked - infection rates are dropping off all around the world, regardless of the vaccination levels. It looks more like we hit natural herd immunity at about the same time in different places whether or not masks and lockdowns were used.
The war-sized effort includes a lot of other things besides vaccines: lockdowns, masks, drastic reduction of international travel, tankerfuls of hand desinfectant, etc.
Yes, then it starts to have an impact; without those, there would have been mayhem.
If all that - which was in place in late spring and summer last year - was the reason, then why did cases start increasing anyway in the fall?
For the two additional things you've mentioned: Limiting travel works to prevent the virus from entering an area, but if it's already there and uncontrolled it wouldn't have an effect. Likewise excessive hand disinfectant doesn't seem to have had an effect, because the virus doesn't really spread through surfaces like that [0] - it was an early precaution that wasn't reexamined.
Your reasoning does not make sense at all. I hope you're just missing GP's point. Maintaining a 1 meter distance has been shown to reduce the likelihood of contagion by 80%. Using a face mask has been shown to reduce the likelihood of contagion by 40%.
With that in mind, and knowing that these were only two of the many measures made to reduce the infection rate, your parahprased statement "the measures were meaningless because they didn't stop the epidemic" is completely incorrect.
An epidemic isn't on or off. It develops at different rates, exponential->logistic if R>1 and exponentially dampening if R<1 for each area. A very steep exponential phase will obviously cause the problems we have been trying to avoid, and it's similarly obvious that the defensive measures have prevented that outcome most places.
> and it's similarly obvious that the defensive measures have prevented that outcome most places.
I'm saying that looking at aggregate outcomes and comparing locations that took these precautions to ones that didn't, this isn't obvious at all. It looks to me more like these defensive measures didn't work, and I kinda want to know why, if they're as effective as the percentages you gave.
There's plenty of null hypothesis societies to compare with. You'll find a very clear correlation between the outcomes in similar societies that used differing degrees of preventive measures.
It's hard to find a society that took no measures, as the measures so obviously work and no one wants an uncontrolled epidemic, but there's plenty of societies that had differing degrees of catastrophe up to the point where they realized this or started being serious about it. Czech Republic, Peru, Brazil, Bergamo (the latter just being unaware) +++.
Covid initially had a reproductive number between 3 and 6 in the absence of measures - higher for the latest mutations. A cumulative reduction of R of 80% + 40% would make this an R of ~0.25-0.50, but that's assuming 100% compliance everywhere and always.
Indeed, this is what you see in societies that were serious enough but didn't eradicate the virus altogether -- largely no significant epidemic, but wildfire-like eruptions of disease in local communities that don't strictly follow the measures. E.g. classrooms, public transport, homes, pubs/concerts and so on. Norway, as a case in point, currently has an R of 1.33, with measures that kept R cleanly below zero until the British mutation became dominant (through initial seeding through import and then a few almost-inevitable cases). Cities where measures can almost always be followed have almost no disease, the illness only spreads in areas where many people live close together and have children/teenagers in school. This alone is enough to threaten the capacity of intensive care.
Personally I don't really think this merits much debate anymore, if the objective is to seek the truth rather than some ulterior motive (e.g. politicians who wouldn't mind if the pension liabilities fell). It's not subtle if you actually dig into the details.
"Virus in the area" is not binary, on or off. It's always about rates and doses. Everyone is not infected instantly.
Germany provides a useful testbed for the impact of mask usage, because the mask mandates have been decided on local regional levels (federal state or city) at different times. From these different times of mask mandates and different progression of epidemic in the areas that are otherwise comparable, we can see that mask usage has a clear impact.
As said, it doesn't stop the epidemic alone, but it helps to contain it. To beat it, we need immunity through vaccines.
It did work, hospitals can only absorbs so many patients in ICU per weeks/months. Once an hospital is at 100% capacity people start dying because they can't be treated (not only for covid)
It really isn't rocket science, of course natural herd immunity is helping, spreading it over a year vs a month is a game changer though.
So COVID is dangerous enough to lock down entire societies, but not dangerous enough to justify continued vaccination when 1 in 166,666 have blood clotting? This is probably the background rate.
It seems like Europe and its bureaucrats just can't let go of lockdown. Or alternatively, they wish to push the vaccines and end of lockdown into Spring/Summer, where natural seasonality will take care of COVID and give the appearance that lockdown and vaccines were a success.
53% is nothing. Peru peaked at 260% excess mortality in February (2nd wave) and 230% in July (1st wave). My Facebook was (and is) a depressive mess of sad announcements.
> Or alternatively, they wish to push the vaccines and end of lockdown into Spring/Summer, where natural seasonality will take care of COVID and give the appearance that lockdown and vaccines were a success.
Did you somehow forget that this is the second year of Covid? We've already gone through the whole "natural seasonality" cycle and the disease is very much still here.
From an average of about 50k cases reported daily in April through October to about 200k cases reported daily in November, December, and January, then back down to 60k by March.
And there's a similar winter increase in the worldwide cases (some of which is from the US cases, but not all):
Further, South American countries were some of the worst hit during the Nov - Feb timeline. South Africa was badly hit around this time. And all these are Southern Hemisphere countries that were experiencing summer around then.
Now, there’s clear evidence that warmer weather makes things easier, since the virus has lower survivability outside a host in the heat, so all things equal, the spread would be lower in warmer weather, but it’s not so much lower that it can be considered seasonal, like the flu.
This is what seasonality means. It doesn't mean "it'll be eliminated next season".
They're referring more to, success can be claimed for lockdowns/etc whether or not they had an effect, simply by waiting until the natural seasonality causes a drop in cases.
yes, a certain seasonality is very probable. But with the variants we have right now (e.g. B1.1.7 from Kent), summer won't be enough to stem the tide. I'm saying this from a central european perspective (with not enough vaccinations either to help).
"Only" 6 5 higher mortality is huge excess mortality.
(In reality, in Sweden mortality is about 4.5 % higher than the average of 2015-2019, but that is still very significant; and of course, covid is not just that one either dies or is fine; there is the substantial but currently not very well known number of people with long-term health impact from the infection)
We already place a human value on life in healthcare, via QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Years)
This is typically about $50,000/year in places like the UK.
If you run this same calculation against what we have done for COVID, the figure comes to tens of millions of dollars per life year.
The same sums spent on lockdown and lockdown compensation could have been invested in general healthcare, or tackling air pollution (which kills 800,000 Europeans a year).
COVID lockdowns should not be immune from the cost-benefit calculations that all other Government programmes are subject to. Its also totally reasonable to ask why we tolerate influenza, which is a leading cause of deaths and fills hospitals each season, but not COVID.
> We already place a human value on life in healthcare, via QALY (Quality Adjusted Life Years)
That calculation is profoundly flawed and is based on linearity: some of the most expensive treatments are extortionate, relative to the true and actual cost to produce, against the QALY/DALY calculation. Instead, if a pharmaceutical company or a medical device company charges an extortionate amount of money for a product, the patents should be seized and governments should be allowed to produce them themselves. In a lot of cases, government funding does 80-90%+ of the research and work that allows the medical product to be marketed.
In the case of coronavirus, some governments, such as the United States, had the capability, at least theoretically to at least try and pursue the elimination strategy. That is, if the United States did not have a neoliberal government in place at the time and the citizens of the United States actually trusted its public officials. A lot of smaller countries have fared well during the pandemic. It is clear that the elimination strategy has been quite successful from an economic standpoint, for the countries that have pursued it.
> The same sums spent on lockdown and lockdown compensation could have been invested in general healthcare, or tackling air pollution (which kills 800,000 Europeans a year).
As for this matter, health insurance (private/public/national) should absolutely cover PAPRs (powered air purifying respirators) for people who are immunocompromised, have lung issues, have severe heart issues, or are at high risk from dying from illnesses like influenza. There are now half-mask (non-helmet and/or not full facemask) PAPRs that are more discreet and wearable, that are much more pragmatic than typical masks: https://industrial.optrel.com/en/product-selector-1/swiss-ai...
It is crucial that we first and foremost protect our most vulnerable, out of the principle of solidarity.
Obviously some of those deaths are directly from global warming. We have not done enough with respect to global warming, and people will die. But, this is unacceptable and we knew that it was coming. We have to do more, and putting a dollar amount on the lives of the most vulnerable is a distraction that keeps us from doing better as a society. We all pay a price by doing this.
Actually the actions work out at about $50k per qaly in US. We spent $5tn to save 1m lives Who each had about 20 years left to live. That would be $250k per qaly but hopefully not all of the $5tn was wasted/spend on additional health care costs, lot of it was to build roads and bail out mafia run multi employer pension systems in US which would have happened anyway
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.
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.
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.
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.
On the contrary, I'm just repeating the published data and opinions of experts and indeed health agencies from the WHO to the EMA (European Medical Agency).
I think it is therefore those who are calling for who have suspended this vaccine to explain the reasons because they seem to baffle everyone.
Bearing in mind the previous 'doubts' some in the EU had about the vaccine's effectiveness for people above 65 I am not convinced that this 'cautionary approach' is all in good faith... And the head of Italy's medicine authority has just said that this was politically motivated...
What published data are you referring to? Because the event that's causing this is in no way within the statistical references most of the British media is pumping out - which is what you're talking about when you say "blood cloths".
It's not "just blood cloths", it's the type of cloths, where they are located, with low pallet count, with more incidence on a younger age group, localized in an hospital staff.
The European Union medicines regulator has reiterated there is "no indication" that the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid jab causes blood clots, after several countries paused their rollouts.
European Medicines Agency (EMA) head Emer Cooke said she remained "firmly convinced" that the benefits of the vaccine outweighed any risks.
But even if the blood clots observed are in fact due to the vaccine the numbers are so small that it seems to me irresponsible to suspend vaccination and to publicise this so much.
> Birth control pills can also cause thrombosis. So why is there all
the fuss about the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca?
It is true that for birth control pills thromboses, even with fatal outcome, are known as a very rare side effect. They are listed in the Summary of Product Characteristics (SmPC). The birth control pill is available only on
prescription. Every woman must be informed of this risk by the prescribing
physician. For the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca, there is currently a
suspected very rare side effect of sinus vein thrombosis with accompanying
platelet deficiency, sometimes fatal. It is not listed in the SmPC.
The consideration of whether the vaccine can continue to be used even
though it may cause this very rare side effect (if necessary, after this risk has been added to the SmPC) will be made at the European level by the
European Medicines Agency (EMA) and at the national level by politicians.
The procedure has been initiated.
Which sounds pretty clearly like bureaucratic CYA instead of an actual cost/benefit analysis that takes into account the excess deaths that are now being caused due to pausing the vaccine rollout.
I'm set to take the oxford d vaccine, but I could also take the pfizer vaccine.
I've had elevated blood markers for clotting during covid-19, and now I hear of this.
I'm thinking of taking 75 mg aspirin, before and after the vaccine. On the other hand, the issue is the patients have low platelet count and I understand that this is the way aspirin reduces blod clotting.
So, do these patients have low platelet count because they had blod clots, or the other way around?
Afik, in the case of COVID-19, clotting is an autoimune issue, so perhaps the clotting is not something related to the astra Zeneca vaccine, but something about the immune response itself.
Talk to your doctor before making decisions. Taking aspirin right before a vaccine might not be a good idea as it can blunt your immune system response, but the whole point of a vaccine is to elicit a strong immune response that builds memory. I know acetaminophen is specifically mentioned as something not to take right before the COVID-19 vaccines (and afterwards, if you can deal with the immune response naturally).
I'm not a doctor but I can tell you what they will say and save op $200 for a useless visit. Doctor will mention there's no data and does not recommend it.
Is there a citation for that (acetaminophen mentioned as something not to take right before and afterwards COVID-19 vaccine)?
From personal experience today (spouse getting second dose of Moderna), the nurse explicitly suggested using Tylenol to handle fever in case it occurs.
For all currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines, antipyretic or analgesic medications (e.g., acetaminophen, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) can be taken for the treatment of post-vaccination local or systemic symptoms, if medically appropriate. <ellipsis>
AFIK, the dosage for blood thinning properties is 75mg, anti-inflammatory dosage is much higher.
I'm not worried about blunted immune response because I've taken heaps of asprin when I had COVID-19 (it might be why I got tinnitus for close to 6 months afterwards -- that or the antibiotics) and I mean grams per day and I had very high antibodies levels afterwards.
(Not a doctor) From listening to the "Faucis" of various countries (incuding the original): I believe that the vaccine is not a watered down virus, so technically you are not making yourself vulnerable/more sensitive to the virus. It is suppsed to 'teach' your body how to build the defence.
Only the Chinese virus is a 'watered down' version of the virus. All the others (including the Russian) is an RNA-type-thingie.
What in the world are you going on about? Drugs can make your immune system's response less severe--this is straight medical fact, look up diphenhydramine (benadryl) or anti-histamines in general.
No where did I say any of these vaccines are 'live' or even attenuated coronavirus. It is 100% impossible to get infected with covid-19 from any of the vaccines. However it is possible to take a drug which lowers your immune system response and you fail to build a strong response to the vaccine and the spike protein RNA or other bits in the vaccine. Hence why I said _talk to your doctor before doing anything like taking aspirin right before the vaccine_.
This site is full of pure lunacy when it comes to any COVID-19 or medical issues. The comments in this thread and many others over the past weeks are just unbelievable low quality. Folks, stay in your lanes with software and startups...
"If the rash is itchy, you can take an antihistamine. If it is painful, you can take a pain medication like acetaminophen or a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID)."
I'm going to take a very low dosage of aspirin -- 75mg per day, this dosage has anti-cloting properties, the anti-inflammatory properties start at higher dosages.
> Only the Chinese virus is a 'watered down' version of the virus. All the others (including the Russian) is an RNA-type-thingie.
This is not true. There are 11 current vaccines in use around the world, of 4 different types. Even the vaccine mentioned in this article is an adenovirus-vector vaccine.
The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines are the only mRNA vaccines.
According to a high-ranking doctor on the German TV today, the observed effect isn't normal thrombosis but a brain related thromboses, where prophylactic treatment is not possible.
I am a bit out of my depth here, but from what I understood, it is not a normal kind of thrombosis, but more an interaction of the immune system with the thrombocytes in the brain which actually causes bleedings, so aspirine or any other blood thinner would not be helpful.
Okay, so they looked for correlations with a million conditions and when they found a vaguely significant one they automatically suspended the vaccination campaign prolonging by days or weeks the national lockdown.
Is that the real reason? In times of crisis one must be wary of propaganda. AstraZeneca has recently announced they'd deliver even less to the EU because of Italy's interception of the delivery headed to Australia [0]... Europe having to halt the vaccinations with AstraZeneca due to none being in stock makes europe lose far more face than halting them because of quality concerns...
> The Paul Ehrlich Institute (German: Paul-Ehrlich-Institut – Bundesinstitut für Impfstoffe und biomedizinische Arzneimittel, PEI) is a German research institution and medical regulatory body, and is the German federal institute for vaccines and biomedicines. It is a federal agency and subordinate to the Federal Ministry of Health.
They are hopefully scientific, but they are definitely not independent, not even by name.
It is, according to the law (Gesetz über das Bundesinstitut für Impfstoffe und biomedizinische Arzneimittel) a "selbstständige Bundesbehörde" and true, it is not independent as a judge and not independent as public broadcasters, but its not a mere department of the ministry directly tied to the political will of the minister, but bound to its task by law.
> AstraZeneca on Friday said unspecified export restrictions now rendered plans to bring in large amounts of doses made outside Europe unlikely. It said it now expects to provide 100 million doses to the EU in the first half of this year, down from earlier commitments of around 270 million.
Australia also likely won't be looking to export theirs now, until their whole country is immunized. They are targetting to produce 100 million doses by the end of the year.
All of this over the 3.8 million doses they bought, and were intercepted and taken by Italy (whose export control already reduced the shipment size to 780k doses).
