In the US, ~160,000 people over the age of 85 have died while 216 people under the age of 18 have died. Covid represents a proportion of deaths from all causes of 13.5% for 85+ and 0.58% under 18. The trend in between the age group extremes continues in an expected way.
You can't make the same decisions about risks when you have one side so skewed by age. There is absolutely no guarantee that side effects from vaccination would be a preferable risk for younger populations or that vaccination side effects would have comparable age-related effects.
Covid response isn't a religion, it's not "we have to do everything" or "we shouldn't do anything", responses need reason not gut reactions.
0.58% is an order of magnitude higher then 30 out of 17 million. Going by these numbers, AZ is still better than COVID. And I doubt any worse than other vaccines.
It is 0.58% of all deaths being caused by covid. As in 994 out of 1000 people under 18 died in the same period from other things.
Compared to people who are alive covid killed 0.000288% (or 1 in 350,000) under 18s.
30 in 17M is too few to have a reliable statistic, but that comes out to 1 in 567,000.
If that holds, is age invariant, etc. etc. and ignoring the time-based nature of the covid deaths, taking that vaccine would represent a *50%* increase in death risk for under 18s, which is just absurdly high. (it doesn't matter that that 50% isn't exactly right, anything remotely close is an unacceptable risk)
One metric is the ratio of COVID deaths / total deaths the other is COVID deaths / total population.
Since everyone is expected to get the vaccine, it's not fair to compare COVID deaths / total deaths to vaccine deaths / total population, you need to compare COVID deaths / total population to vaccine deaths / total population.
In this case, assuming the numbers posted are remotely accurate, then this specific vaccine could end up being far more dangerous to people under 18 years of age compared to getting COVID and waiting it out for two weeks.
We don't know and I'm not asserting one way or another. I'm just saying that making comparisons is much more difficult and nuanced than the straightforward naiive approach.
They are relatively close, enough so that unknowns may change the equation. Are there more unknowns for covid in young people, or more unknowns from the vaccines?
(I'm not commenting on how to solve this equation, just pointing out other factors)
Wouldn't taking the 1 in 567,000 risk eliminate the 1 in 350,000 risk. Vaccine risk and disease risks don't stack. But I could be mistaken, statistics is hard you know.
~200 people in this age bracket in the US already died. If you gave everyone in that age bracket this particular vaccine an additional ~100 might die. They stack, they don't negate, those 200 people already died.
If the covid risk was flat over time, if you offered this vaccine yearly (quite possibly necessary) then you'd be saving ~90 lives in this age bracket per year. 10 would still die of covid, 100 would die from the vaccine, 90 whom would have died of covid would would instead survive.
It would be "better" depending on how you think about better. Telling people to throw away huge chunks of their lives to protect against a risk that you turn around and tell them they need to take a risky vaccine that's only half as bad... it isn't necessarily a good line. Especially because pandemic diseases tend to lower in their negative outcomes at time goes on, the vaccine will probably stay the same while the risk it prevents will get less and less threatening.
All of this based on statistics and assumptions that have a lot of uncertainty in them.
The bottom line is that in order to be a good idea, a vaccine needs to be much safer than the disease it prevents. Half as risky doesn't meet this mark; AZ would be fine for the oldest age bracket because the risk profile wouldn't change much, but the youngest age bracket there is a significant comparison between the two (and perhaps further unknown risks which haven't surfaced)
But you cannot stack people that died, past tense, with people that might die from something else. The best comparison would be comparing people that might die from blood clots against additional people that might die from COVID.
Neither of us was doing that so far. Case mortality seems to be the best basis, adjusted maybe for overall risk of infection when everything is opened up and nobody is using masks anymore. At which point any comparison most likely degenerated into guess work.
The main difference so is that vaccinations reduce the overall risk for the population. And we didn't even talk about severe long term effects of COVID.
That being said, we live with a lot of medications that have severe side effects in the 1/100,000 plus bracket without breaking a sweat.
By the way, I don't see how you come to the conclusion that the AZ vaccine is in any way riskier than COVID.
fwiw about current state of play: in the US and most EU countries no vaccine is even approved for those under 18.
The challenge with COVID as always is that the risk of death is correlated across the population. So a 25 yo having COVID increases the odds that he dies and that everyone around him dies. But that’s a whole other discussion.
You can't make the same decisions about risks when you have one side so skewed by age. There is absolutely no guarantee that side effects from vaccination would be a preferable risk for younger populations or that vaccination side effects would have comparable age-related effects.
Covid response isn't a religion, it's not "we have to do everything" or "we shouldn't do anything", responses need reason not gut reactions.