Why vaccine safety experts put the brakes on AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine | Hacker News Reader

Why vaccine safety experts put the brakes on AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine

sciencemag.org

52 pointssohkamyung23 comments

IMHO there's a strong political element to this. The EU and the UK are at loggerheads. The EU is upset that they couldn't secure enough vaccines quickly enough, and they sometimes think the UK jumped the queue.

It's also about money. Why not divert the funds to vaccines manufactured in the EU? The Pfizer vaccines are made in Germany and Belgium. BioNTech is in Mainz in Germany.

Further up the supply chains, both Moderna and BioNTech get a lot of material from within the EU. Companies like Lonza AG and several others benefit if the EU chooses these vaccines over the Oxford/AZ one.

> symptoms seen in at least 13 patients, all between ages 20 and 50 and previously healthy, in at least five countries are more frequent than would be expected by chance. The patients, at least seven of whom have died, suffer from widespread blood clots, low platelet counts, and internal bleeding—not typical strokes or blood clots

Seems very political indeed.

I love that people think money & politics might be in play in the suspension of vaccines, without considering what that might mean about the same decision makers' approvals of the vaccines.

Europe's own official medical & regulatory agencies studied the vaccines and have authorized AstraZeneca for general use. This is from their Pharmacovigilance Risk Assessment Committee.

https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory/overview/publi...

The blood clots happened in people with very specific health conditions

https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/covid-19-vaccine-astrazene...

Can't get any more official than this.

If our EU states choose to block AZ after this, then it's clearly a decision based on factors beyond health & medical.

Yeah, if you discount the risks of the disease they are for, it turns out it’s safer not to take the vaccines.

Actually, several prominent scientists have pointed out that the percentage of blood clot related deaths is actually (slightly) lower in the group that's taken the vaccine than the worldwide average, so....

But the honest truth is that young, healthy people _can_ discount the risks of COVID-19.

The number of young healthy people killed by COVID-19 is very, very low.

This ignores young healthy long haulers, who very much do exist. I know one very close to me, and based on their doctor’s experience they’re not alone. Everything from blood clots to chronic fatigue.

AZ vaccine is made with a genetically engineered Chimpanzee virus, ChAdOx1 . It makes me uneasy. Zoonotic viruses tend to be more dangerous the closer related the species. There's plenty of human viruses that seem harmless like flu except for rare cases where they kill. How do we know that ChAdOx1 is not one of these?

I would be less worried if they used a fish virus or something. My primary concern is using a virus from such a closely related species. The mRNA approach without a live virus seems safer

The AZ vaccine needs to be able to enter your cells to work. That limits it to viruses that started off being able to infect you; we're not vulnerable to very many fish viruses. There's also the problem that we eat fish, and thus get exposed to fish viruses: one of the problems with using carrier viruses is you can already have immunity to them. If you do, the vaccine can be destroyed prior to it entering your cells, prior to it being able to induce those cells to create the spike protein that leads to COVID-19 immunity.

https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/covid-19-how-do-vi...

The funniest response to this whole thing so far has been the Taiwanese health minister claiming "Westerners have a 5 to 10 times higher chance of developing blood clots than Asians" when asked about the AZ vaccine being used in Taiwan. He's a dentist.

I think one shot is enough. I got two modernas and I’ve had side effects that have persisted.

Would you care to share what the side effects which persist were?

I had COVID and my side effects (lack of concentration and having the short term memory of a gold fish) lasted 4 months+. My sense of smell is this’ll not back almost 6 months now.

Nothing like that. Just weird tingles and numbness, headache and what I’d call a left side chest ache. Doc says it’ll resolve in 4-6 weeks. I know people with swollen lymph nodes, arm pain and joint pain. So less severe than covid for sure I guess... just weird. I was fine after the first shot. It was the second one that appears to be correlated. I think these are normal but nobody is discussing them.

It is normal for booster shots to have more side effects.

Yes, I know another person who had severe lymph node swelling, it lasted a few weeks after the first shot, and then returned for a few days after the second.

Were you informed on how to report your side effects to the CDC's official database VAERS?

> I was fine after the first shot

You were also not that well protected (though one could argue well enough for a start).

Did you get your antibody levels tested? What data points support “one shot is enough”?

No, just my annoyance with the second dose side effects. But I might be a hypochondriac. They are probably minor in the grand scheme of things but I think are real and noticeable. I’d still get the 2nd shot just maybe in the other arm.

The same goes with Pfizer, many people have said the same thing that the second shot was hash on them, one colleague said he had to stay in bed on the second say. I wonder did developers of these vaccine pushed for higher dose in trial for a better chance of success. I am yet to receive the second dose, slightly worried.

https://www.sfgate.com/coronavirus/article/Weird-COVID-vacci...

To be crystal clear here, you said that one vaccine shot is enough to keep people safe and healthy because the second one made your arm sore?

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