>>What has AstraZeneca said?
The company says there is no evidence of an increased risk of clotting due to the vaccine.
It said it had received 37 reports of blood clots out of more than 17 million people vaccinated in the EU and UK as of 8 March.<<
37 reports out of 17 million vaccinations.
this is aprox. 1 report out of 510 000 vaccinations.
what is not shown is spatial distribution over population. this would provide insight regarding statistical groups such as those who recieved a bad batch [if extant] or those with existing cerebovascular pathology concurrent with vaccination.
i cant say im a fan of the adenovirus vector approach, for technical reasons, however it does appear to be a vaccine for those not immune to adenovirus.
That being said, every drug has side effects. A vaccine isn't any different.
It's baffling that so many countries rushed into suspending the vaccine. By all means they should track and investigate potentially serious side effects but it's unclear to me why they escalated this so much when, at least based on the raw numbers (ie. about 50 cases of blood clots out of about 17 million injections), the incidence of blood clots is minimal even if caused by the vaccine (people have a higher risk of dying in a car accident than developing a blood clot after an injection...)
I feel some countries suspended it out of 'peer pressure'. For example it seems to me that France did not really want to suspend it but did soon after Germany announced it would. Now they have already said they will resume immediately and that the PM will get an AZ injection tomorrow to show it's fine.
It is a scientifically and statistically rigorous look at the available data that takes into account how people probably feel about the whole issue.
Also scientists in Norway claim they found the mechanism that causes it.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/it-s-very-special-pi...
https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/KyGv2G/professor-says-...
There is also a twitter thread by one of the article's authors summarizing the article and discussing some additional information.
Is there an answer to this yet? The batch that a particular person's dose came from is carefully documented (or at least should be - it is in the USA).
Specifically it doesn't say "safe and effective", it says "benefits outweight risks" (BBC says that at well, but they removed that bit from the headline).
“ The committee has come to a clear scientific conclusion: This is a safe and effective vaccine. Its benefits in protecting people from COVID19 with the associated risks of death and hospitalization outweigh the possible risks.”
[1] https://youtu.be/qYmP02SIQNIDoes this confirm the motivations were scientific?
No.
Let's see what Norway and Germany will do, I think the eyes are more on them - since they are dealing with those cases. Also if more cases keep showing.
Example, with made up numbers:
"You are 4 times as likely to suffer a blood clot from a 4 hour flight than from getting vaccinated with the AZ vaccine."
Paul Hunter, an infectious disease expert at the University of East Anglia, noted in a statement that even if the risk of CVT is raised by the vaccine to five or more cases per million people vaccinated, the COVID-19 infection fatality rate for men in their mid-40s is 0.1%, or 1000 deaths per million infected.
A lot of young people won't even find the "relief" they got from knowing COVID is more lethal on the elderly, since this seems to be happening on younger females.
It's not an easy problem to fix, and I see a lot of people refusing this until they get to the bottom of the reason, a safe treatment for these cases. I'd say this will probably be the end of the road for AZ vaccine in a lot of places.
Not to mention the pile of fuck-ups AZ did for months in a row, they painted themselves as unreliable and liars to the public.
Given the incident rate and the growing COVID swells in a few european countries (France and Italy especially), the slow vaccination progress, not helped by hesitance over AZ and surprising prevalence of vaccine hesitancy in general, you could just as well argue the opposite. Nations that are overcautious may lose far, far, far, far more lives thanks to covid infections than an extremely rare handful of blood clots which haven't even been tied causally to the vaccine yet. The risk reward narrative on this topic has been really bizarre so far.
You seem to suggest risk-reward analysis be viewed at by the number of deaths.
Germany had to suspend vaccination (temporarily) due to legal reasons and risk of a lawsuit to the state.