Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjbeswick | Hacker News Reader

In Europe 18 thromboembolic events reported for 20 million immunisations using the vaccine, so it's hard to imagine why some countries there have suspended it's use.

View on HN

In Norway, there are now three deaths after vaccination (antibodies have not yet been reported in all cases, though) in people below 55 years. That's a huge number; for comparison, eight women below 60 years have died from COVID-19 (in total)

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

Even more so considering that, IIRC, only about 120K people were vaccinated with AstraZeneca in Norway.

There is something strange going on in Scandinavia because UK has reported nothing special with two orders of magnitude more people vaccinated. But it's definitely a cause for concern, at the very least.

>There is something strange going on in Scandinavia because UK has reported nothing special with two orders of magnitude more people vaccinated.

I don't want to start conspiracy theories but I wouldn't be surprised if it came to light that, in the UK, reports about deaths and side-effects have been suppressed. In the wake of a disastrous Brexit, the UK is in desperate need of a success story and with the Astrazeneca/Oxford vaccine seen as the British contender, it might have become a question of national pride to have it succeed. British newspapers (well, tabloids) present the UK vaccination rate as a vindictive competition with the EU.

As a UK citizen, I would be very surprised. The government might want to do that, but I can't see the medical professionals standing for it.

The UK, like most countries, is very transparent with reporting side effects and has a robust system for capturing the data.

Please don’t start moronic conspiracy theories

It's about as moronic as the people calling individual EU countries' cautious response to the blood clotting cases a political face saving measure by Brussels.

> I wouldn't be surprised if it came to light that, in the UK, reports about deaths and side-effects have been suppressed

If we (I'm British) were accomplished enough to reputation-manage for the vaccine response, I'd have expected the initial (huge) death toll to have been under-reported too - which it clearly hasn't.

The UK vaccinated old people first. At least here in Germany we had the problem that AstraZeneca was only allowed to be used with people <65. That could be one explanation.

all health workers and immunocompromised people as well. plenty of young people have been jabbed in the uk

Not just immunocompromised. Group 6 was anyone <65yo with a clinical condition which made them more vulnerable. Nearly 7 million people were eligable for that. I imagine they have nearly been done by now, and at least half would have had AZ, so that's 3.5m young(ish) people that have had AZ used.

No, the UK also vaccinated healthcare workers and all care home workers in the first phase too so there would have been many vaccinated under 60.

There are 441,498 staff working in care homes alone and nearly 90% of these were vaccinated in the first phase.

Weren't healthcare workers vaccinated predominantly with Pfizer in the UK?

If Europe are so far behind in vaccinations, and these clots are being seen in those <60, why have these people been vaccinated?

> it's hard to imagine why some countries there have suspended it's use

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.

> Even 1 death in a million outpaces COVID-19 deaths in young people

It absolutely doesn't

https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/11/18/covid-infection-fatalit...

In the 20-24 range it is 60 per million

40-49 range it is ~ 10x that

Well, yes, but you have to consider that (hopefully) everyone will get the vaccine, and not everyone will get COVID. Infection rates are below 1 out of 60 in many countries.

To be fair, I shouldn't have said that it'd be better than doing nothing (because in that case eventually everyone will get COVID-19), but it'd still be better to wait for another vaccine.

People seem to think that delivered vaccine doses will get thrown into the trash during the suspension. In reality it just means that the doses accumulate for a week or two and will be administered more quickly after vaccinations are resumed.

Because if you cause 1 death by doing something, it’s your fault and you’ll have to defend yourself. But if you don’t to something and 100 people die, you can just blame something or someone else. In this case then it’s just the fault of those anti-maskers, or whatever group you point at.

I think it only counts as sticking one's neck out and being responsible if you deviate from the policy followed by the herd, whether it's to do something or do nothing.

As a politician the only thing that counts is what sticks to you, and those 100 deaths that happened because you were doing nothing will not stick to you. That’s just not the way people think.

One death is too many. I can't imagine that being my mum / sister / kid.

Emotionally, this is true.

Literally, this is false in a way that harms our ability to handle disasters.

That’s why you elect officials who are supposed to think in terms of statistics.

They do, but it’s too frequently: if I do this, how does that affect my chance to be re-elected?

Yep, doesn't help. France has a critical election next year. Germany has a couple this year, including a federal one. And sometimes I wonder whether politicians base COVID measures on their election chances or on effectiveness.

You're a public official in Germany. You have a pandemic raging that already killed 75000 with at most 25% of population that had a disease. On the other hand you have a vaccine that kills 37 for 17 000 000 jabs provided (360 if scaled to 2 jabs to everyone).

One death is of course too many. 360 even more so. But if an alternative is an extra 75'000 I know which choice I would like my public officials to make.

Alternative is to extend the vaccination to younger or more willing crowds. It is basically win-win.

Everybody knows that the alternative is not an extra 75'000 deaths. Perhaps your implicit criticism of public officials is warranted, and I would love to see a well-reasoned argument -- but as it stands I think your comment is quite unhelpful.

Would you rather your mum / sister / kid died of COVID? Because that's more likely.

Already had covid and they beat it in 10 days or so. So yeah, ready to take the chance as they are young and fit.

My point is that even a young and fit person has a higher chance of dying of COVID (10x or 100x higher) than by blood clots from the vaccine, given what we know about that risk.

The exact same argument can be applied to not vaccinating too.

In only Poland it was 5 cases and 1 death. Previously I heard that there were ~30 cases in EU, I would assume that number would grow not shrink.

Source? I literally know one case personally and I would be pretty surprised if that was a one in a million.

Because it makes for a great excuse for their failure to negotiate their vaccine contracts. The US/UK contracts have a US/UK first clause whereas the EU's don't, despite them being the first to sign with AstraZeneca for example. Now they are stuck exporting vaccines to the rest of the world.

While it is true that the eu got screwed by the us and the uk - there is no conspiracy wrt the temporary stoppage of the az roll out - the blood clots were first reported in Norway which is not in the eu.

How the EU got screwed by the UK and the US is nicely laid out here:

https://twitter.com/DaveKeating/status/1372897635577761803

Pretty sure this is wrong. The UK and the EU paid to set up separate supply chains for the AstraZeneca vaccine, with the UK having first dibs on the output of the UK one (which ended up with better yields, likely in part due to being agreed on and set up first). The EU kept on blaming AstraZeneca's failure to supply enough vaccines to EU countries on them exporting the EU-produced ones to the UK, but as far as I know there's no evidence that ever happened despite police raids on the production facilities and new requirements to get licenses to export vaccines. Also the numbers don't add up at all.

The AstraZeneca vaccine is also the only one with this kind of segregated supply chain, apparently as some kind of contingency plan against vaccine nationalism cutting off imports. All the others, the UK has been content to order from plants within the EU and trust that they won't pull some cynical, Trump-esque vaccine nationalism stunt and cut off exports to distract from their own problems. This appears to have been a serious misjudgement. (And to be clear, distracting from their own problems is pretty much all it would achieve. The UK is so much smaller than the EU that cutting off exports would give very little help to their own vaccine roll-out despite causing massive disruption to the UK one - and that's before even considering the possibility of retaliation.)

> The UK and the EU paid to set up separate supply chains for the AstraZeneca vaccine, with the UK having first dibs on the output of the UK one

The UK is included in the contract of the EU the same way as the EU is included in the one of the EU. That's why there are discussions about the export of vaccine to begin with. Right now AZ exports a few millions of doses out of the EU to the UK.

The medial regulators are not nearly as political as commenters think. There are legitimate concerns in smaller countries about the vaccine because even just few cases of deaths if young people quickly outweigh the number of young people died from covid.

> Because it makes for a great excuse for their failure to negotiate their vaccine contracts.

This argument is beyond ridiculous. It was the decision of health officials, and it wasn't just countries part of eu that have suspended AZ vaccinations.

Misleading narrative

> The US/UK contracts have a US/UK first clause whereas the EU's don't

True, and you can see how the UK gov is fearing the export block. Darned if the EU does, darned if it doesn't. But if doing means more vaccines to the EU so be it.

Though yes, it was probably a mistake treating AZ as a reliable partner and not someone who'll try find any excuses to skip on their obligations. Though it will be hard to convince a judge they're filling their "best effort" requirements

> "it was probably a mistake treating AZ as a reliable partner and not someone who'll try find any excuses to skip on their obligations."

Given they had prior obligations to the UK, I'd say they've been a very reliable partner - to the extent of risking annoying a major market by saying no to the EU.

"the EU's don't, despite them being the first to sign with AstraZeneca"

That's an unusual way to write "The EU signed 3 months after the UK"

The EU signed a day before the UK.

The UK was a beneficiary of the original contract signed on May 17. The EU signed its contract on August 27, the day before another contract was signed by the UK. (edited to clarify dates)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com