The rate of blood clots as a side effect for the AZ covid jab is less than that of the combined contraceptive pill - does that mean that both need to be discontinued?
Now.. maybe it is still worth the risk for a young 20 year old female, but I am not so sure - especially since we luckily have other vaccines that do not show this risk.
If this vaccine is causing at most 4 deaths per million people* vs 648 recorded US covid deaths 15-24 out of a population of 43.5 million. 4 * 43.5 = ~174 < 648. So, it would have been noticeably safer for a random 20 year old American to have taken it Jan 2020 than risk covid. https://knoema.com/atlas/United-States-of-America/topics/Dem...
So if the total future infections are say 1/4 the total infections up to this point then their roughly equivalent risks. Tipping one way or the other based on actual number of infections.
* It’s rare enough that actual risks aren’t clear, but assuming the vaccine is the cause we can assume the risks are at or below that level.
Do we know for sure it's just the AZ vaccine and not the body's reaction to the spike protein(that is, other vaccines should face the same issue).
It sounds really nasty. Blood clots + low blood plate count at the same time.
[1] https://www.nrk.no/norge/innlagt-helsearbeider-dode-_-unders...
On top of that, nearly 3 weeks into hospital and he caught covid. At least the vaccine worked and that's mostly sorted.
MRI says he has suffered catastrophic brain damage and is about to be released for palative care for the last
Now importantly
- I don't know which vaccine he had (and I'm certainly not going to bother my mother over that at the moment)
- He's suffered from seizures for the last few years, although those normally follow infections and high temperatures
But it's disquieting
Whether or not it was the AZ vaccine or not..
"He's suffered from seizures for the last few years, although those normally follow infections and high temperatures"
A vaccine will certainly cause the body to fight the perceived infection, including with high temperatures for some people. It's possible given his history those vaccine side effects should have been considered?
Don't the clots need/use up thr platelets in the process of clotting?
But it seems that the spike protein on the virus/vaccine is quite similar to a protein on the blood plates so if the body has a runaway immune system response to the vaccine it could attack the blood plates too.
The implication here is that this could be true for all the vaccines, there are some similar reports in Israel which do not use the AZ vaccine.
These cases are extremely rare though which is probably the most important thing here. It should not disqualify the vaccines.
I was just wondering about Israel -- they vaccinated sooo many people, if this was an issue with the body's reaction to the S protein, it should pop up in Israel too.
Quote from the German PEI institute [1]:
> 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 whole statement is quite informative: [1] https://www.pei.de/EN/service/faq/coronavirus/faq-coronaviru...
https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/QmwR1V/professor-om-mi...
https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/KyWoy6/jakter-astrazen...
A key quote from the second of those is this:
Madsen har tidligere forklart at det er to nivåer å undersøke bivirkninger på: Gruppebasert, og individbasert. Ifølge Madsen det ikke er noe som tyder på at AstraZeneca-vaksinen er forbundet med en større risiko for blodpropp i statistikken – men det de undersøker, er om det kan finnes bivirkninger som er spesielle og rammer få personer.
My translation:
Madsen has earlier explained that there are two levels of investigation regarding side effects: group based and individual. Accoeding to Madsen there is nothing to indicate that the AstraZeneca vaccine is associated with a greater risk of blood clots in the statistics - but what they are investigating is whether there are side effects that are special and affect few people.
So even if the vaccine is responsible for these deaths, the people making the administration decisions will choose having 10x or 100x the number of people die from not getting them vaccinated quickly. So much for "science-based decision-making"...
The first is multivariate studies are notorious for throwing false positives especially when positive cases are in the sigle digits.
Comparing data sets collected under different surveillance regimes is difficult.
First, the vaccine: Allowing a vaccine that kills people can have very real consequences that go beyond Covid. Vaccines should be as safe as possible, and not doing so can push more folks into vaccine skepticism and anti-vaccine stances. The Covid vaccine making blood clots really can not only mean the pandemic lasts longer and folks stop taking MMR vaccines. That is enough of an issue as-is. The other thing with this particular issue is that it is just one of the vaccines that is doing it - there are other choices, and it just slows how quickly we can vaccinate folks.
As far as contraceptive pills: First, doctors do look at risk factors. Some years back, when I still smoked, my doctor wouldn't give me a pill with estrogen in it because of my age plus smoking meant I had a bigger risk of blood clots. It's OK, like the covid jab, I had other options. The other thing that is really important is that the birth control pill, even with the risk of blood clots, severely cuts the risk of death for some folks. Some women bleed so severely that it risks their health each month. And more to the point, it does a decent job of preventing pregnancy.
Being pregnant - and giving birth - is really, really dangerous, but we sometimes forget this because modern medicine has made death rates drop.
Do the people around alcoholics consent to that?
At some point the risks/reward of various behaviors (let alone the substances that enable them, you don't see people scrambling to ban belts because people hit their kids with them) are such that legislating away things with varying degrees of state violence to back it up isn't worth the tradeoff.
In my local town a couple of months ago a car driver managed to embed their car in a house, fortunately the resident was upstairs at the time and not sitting in their living room, otherwise they would have been dead
Last week another driver hit a stone column, 3' from the road (with sidewalk between), damaging a 500 year old building and meaning the residents had to be evacuated. They're still in a hotel.
How do you propose those people make their own decisions?
Your whataboutism needs some work.
We may argue this makes any rare side effect from the vaccine, which is meant to avoid a potentially serious illness, more acceptable than those from the pill.