AstraZeneca vaccine safe and effective in U.S., Chile, Peru trials

But there is a feeling here that we have thing under control, and in a weird way we do.. we had about 6 covid deaths total, last week.

Austria never followed. As far as I know one charge was discarded after a fatal clotting case in Austria in a nurse. The regulator also said that the risk of not vaccinating outweighs the risk of vaccinating.

Anti-vaxxers shouldn't be pandered to, they should be sent to the back of the queue when the need for ICUs come.

Transparency can be painful in the short run, but in the longer run I feel like it's often the better option.

I don't think a national health authority has to think about these things at all, honestly. I would distrust my local agency if I knew they didn't pause vaccinations that they thought should be paused in order not to affect the vaccine's public image. The problem lies elsewhere.

It's always like: "These vaccines are dangerous, what about sideeffects? You're hiding the sideeffects!"

Then countries and health authorities show that they're very sensitive when sideeffects show up and do a careful investigation. Now being extra careful is criticized as undermining trust in vaccines? (I guess if they had decided to not pause that would've also caused claims that this undermines trust in vaccines, as they're ignoring sideeffects.)

I'm not even saying pausing was the right decision. It was a tough call and I wouldn't want to be in a position to make that call.

But I guess there's one undeniable fact: The Anti-Vax crowd will use whatever happens to construct new bullshit arguments. There's no way to prevent that, and I think the best thing to do about it is to ignore those people as much as possible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/19/world/europe/europe-vacci...

> They get their news from Russia.

part is the one that needs addressing and not the other countries killing confidence by sending mixed signals. In the end it’s an evolutionary process, the ones who are right will survive with a higher probability. Also I am not totally ruling out the posibillity that the sceptical ones might be right in the end. Though I personally believe that it’s a no brainer to take the jab if you are above a certain age (50, 60 idk) or have other health issues.

That seems to be a bigger problem than other countries evaluating and re-evaluating the vaccine.

61% of people in France now think the AZ vaccine is unsafe, up 18 percentage points on February. 55% of Germans think the AZ jab is unsafe, up 15 points on February.

We can add Covid to the 'precautionary principle' victim list that already includes zero-carbon energy, and huge improvements in agricultural productivity.

This issue would be solved by: allowing people to choose vaccine they want (according to our government officials "they are all the same") or/and allow younger crowds to vaccinate.

For sure. After EU nations put the vaccine on hold, pretty much everyone in my circle of friends and family has decided to either not take this vaccine outright or is seriously considering not taking it. This is Canada.

I haven't seen any decent effort to explain to the regular public the scale of risks of anything.

Yet it seems very possible. For example, each person could have presented to them a personal "health card", which showed to them what might happen to them in the next 10 years. It would have on it "Dies from Heart disease", "Covid", "run over by bus", "still living and healthy". Each would have area scaled by likelihood.

Then they could be given another identical health card showing how their health outcomes would change with a vaccine.

Upon seeing "Oh, I have more chance of being healthy in 10 years if I take this vaccine", they'd be much more likely to sign up. Likewise, after a cancer diagnosis, they can be given a new card with "dies of cancer" now being a massive area, and they can readjust their priorities.

I think the trick is the cards must be customized for everyone, taking into account personal risk factors (age, do they smoke, how obese, past health issues, etc.) An entire government department could have as their job reading papers and coming up with a method to produce the cards as accurately as possible.

The hesitance started when Brussels got railed for failing at vaccine distribution.

1-Prime minister is a thug and soon to assume dictators role.

2- Population is in HEAVY decline, unlike most places.

3- Most of the educated people emigrate abroad, and never return, in result the remaining population is mostly in "risk group" .. but it is not a group if its most.

4- 10% of the population (romes), do not count as Bulgarian and will not be vaccinated, so that is also a huge problem.

And most of these factors are due to culture/mentality problems, that stem from within.

So yeh. Bulgaria is not comparable to other countries

The Danish government has no obligation to base its public health policy on what is optically best for Bulgaria. Every Danish person should be able to expect that their government will act in the best interest of Denmark.

> The Committee’s experts looked in extreme detail at records of DIC and CVST reported from Member States, 9 of which resulted in death. Most of these occurred in people under 55 and the majority were women. Because these events are rare, and COVID-19 itself often causes blood clotting disorders in patients, it is difficult to estimate a background rate for these events in people who have not had the vaccine. However, based on pre-COVID figures it was calculated that less than 1 reported case of DIC might have been expected by 16 March among people under 50 within 14 days of receiving the vaccine, whereas 5 cases had been reported. Similarly, on average 1.35 cases of CVST might have been expected among this age group whereas by the same cut-off date there had been 12. A similar imbalance was not visible in the older population given the vaccine.

This seems to be yet another case where the news is incapable of keeping up with timely technical information. No mistakes were made, the pause could have gone either way and we should generally be more understanding of difficult but timely decisions made in the face of uncertainty.

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

Indeed, as with everything around this pandemic has been, the turnaround time has been breathtakingly fast. I'm curious what infrastructure or methodology is supporting such a radical pace?!

I am getting my second jab tomorrow. Vaccine is still far better than the virus itself.

"The worst was the migraine and vomiting, but I also had aches, chills and exhaustion."

The reporter recovered but wonders why some people get more severe side-effects than others. Could it have something to do with age? Paradoxically, the older you are, the less likely you are to experience side-effects.

Vaccine side effects: My experience of them and what they mean:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56375307

Also, Inside Health: Covid vaccine side-effects (podcast)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000t48v

I believe the second dose of the AZ vaccine is at 2 months. If your second is at 3 weeks, you got a Pfizer shot, not AZ.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014067362...

This seems to be the case for younger/healthier people.

Source (Norwegian): https://www.nrk.no/osloogviken/to-pasienter-dode-av-blodprop...

Really? I can imagine quite a few reasons:

* When usage was suspended, it wasn't yet known whether it was limited to 18 cases or that was just the top of the iceberg.

* Even 1 death in a million outpaces COVID-19 deaths in young people, so vaccinating could be worse than not doing anything for them.

* Vaccins with fatal side effects can significantly reduce the willingness to be vaccinated, so even if statistically it's a good trade-off, the end result can be better by not using it.

And it's not like the doses that would've been used in those few days were thrown away. They were simply rescheduled for a week later -- the full vaccination effort isn't going to be done any day later due to this delay.

I completely disagree. I think part of why this anti-science attitude is prevalent is because people acknowledge it an try to respond to it. You should not engage in a conversation about whether vaccines cause autism or whether the earth is flat. You simply enact policies that enforce the right thing. Because this shouldn't be a discussion.

Responding to those people only validates their stance.

What matters is that the concerns the general populace may have are addressed, and usually they are. A GP who takes the time to get to know their patients and allay any concerns about vaccination in general is much more important to be able to reach the people who may have read weird things on social media, but are not in full-out wappie-teritory.

The blod clots are not a rumour, they're there. It's not certain the vaccine caused them, but that doesn't make this a rumour. And the events do seem to be unusual enough that they certainly need investigation.

Doesn't mean the vaccine is unsafe, the events seem to be still very rare, even if they are caused by the vaccine, so the benefits still outweigh the risks. But the events are very serious, so this does need to be monitored closely and needs to be taken seriously. Downplaying potential side effects is not the way to create trust in the vaccine.

You are being disingenuous here. The vast majority of skeptics in this case are people who have been thoroughly vaccinated against other things and are simply concerned about the accelerated testing schedule of these particular vaccines.

Pfizer and Moderna both seem to show lower neutralizing antibody responses, but not nothing, and while there is some question of if "2/3rds less is enough," there's also some other significant considerations around the T-cell response that's triggered by those two and its robust effectiveness even against B.1.351. But not so much with AZ, which continues to show itself as ineffective against the variant: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/91658

The EU contract was signed the day before the UK one, no?

The same would be the case with Sinovac, with the added proviso that I would want to know if it had been developed using human tests on their concentration camp inmates.

The closest ones to this are probably vector vaccines like the AZ one, because they use a "relatively" well-known delivery technique (as in: one that was at least already used for a single market-ready vaccine before the Covid-19 ones). For that reason, AZ has several production partnerships around the world already, for example with the Serum Institute of India, and the AZ vaccine is considered the likely "workhorse" for global immunization because of this relative ease of manufacturing (and storage, of course).

But it quickly gets harder with the mRNA vaccines. While those are also produced in production partnerships and subcontractor scenarios, the original producer appears to be much more intertwined with its subcontractors, performing some steps by themselves and outsourcing other steps. mRNA vaccine mass production technology is relatively proprietary and new, even newer than the already-pretty-new vector vaccine stuff, and the entire mass production scale-up has only been done very recently under massive time pressure for these Covid-19 vaccines. This basically dictates that with these outsourcing initiatives, the original producer cannot simply hand over some instructions and wait for finished vaccines to appear at the loading bay of a subcontractor, but has to transfer significant amounts of very specialized know-how to the subcontractors, which makes such operations very personnel-intensive and hard to scale.

Two highly recommended links that provide very informative details about mRNA manufacturing hurdles in particular are these: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my... https://blog.jonasneubert.com/2021/01/10/exploring-the-suppl...

It is also available under other names, for example the world's largest producer of vaccines is the Serum Institute of India, and they are making a Covishield branded version of it (they are aiming, I think, for around 900 million doses).