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Comment by ddlsmurf | Hacker News Reader

My understanding was that the rate was still lower than it is in the unvaccinated population; and while they conclude "only the vaccine could explain these cases", I wonder how many cases in the unvaccinated population are investigated this thoroughly.

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> My understanding was that the rate was still lower than it is in the unvaccinated population

That was when it was thought to be a normal thrombosis. The one they identified then, was actually an extremely rare one "Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis":

> an estimated 3-4 cases per million annual incidence in adults

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_venous_sinus_thrombos...

I love following quickly-developing stories like this, where the best knowledge available develops day by day.

You can be dead certain that a lot of the people who read the news at an early point in time, will go to their deaths believing that the initial quote was correct. It pays off to have a shifting degree of certainty about things like this.

Same for all those "the same thing is 1000 times as common with the pill" posts

That depends on the country. Norway had four cases of fatal blood clothing in young people which is significant considering only 9 people below 50 died of covid there.

No the point is that there should be on average ~4 people dying of these sorts of fatal blood clotting anyway.

Not in that age range and in that sample size. Don’t forget that those are not random blood clotting cases but very rare ones.

Any cause of death is very rare if you get hyper-specific about the details.

Which is the issue here. An event that should be rare is not rare among AZ vaccinated.

I can't find anything about Norway having 4 fatalities associated with blood clotting.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-say-they-found-cause...

>Norway registered three cases of CVST, one of them fatal. The country vaccinated around 120,000 people with the shot.

https://sciencenorway.no/covid19/norwegian-experts-say-deadl...

>Holme led the work to find out why three health workers under the age of 50 were hospitalized with serious blood clots and low levels of blood platelets after having taken the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine. One of the health workers died on Monday.

Five admitted younger than 50, three dead. In total has 130 000 Norwegians been vaccinated with Astra Zeneca.

Use your favorite service to translate from Norwegian: https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/gW4wbL/legemiddelverke...

Like me, GP might be confused, as two deaths from blood clots among five hospitalized for it were reported last week. Then yesterday, as mentioned in sibling's link, two more deaths were reported (as having happened on March 21). This is where the 4 figure is deduced from.

I don't know the source of this confusion; it might have disappeared in an editorial decision. But as reported in said link, it is certain that three are now dead and five have been hospitalized.

It would be interesting to know why Norway has had such a high incidence of this (presumed) deadly side effect, and why it hasn't been discovered in others.

For countries that have a low incidence of covid, a fatality rate like this among younger people makes it a tricky ethical decision, especially if other vaccines will soon be available. My money is on it either being explicitly pulled or sometimes becoming very unpopular in these countries.

It's crazy to say that it is a safe vaccine with those statistics.

It really depends what rate you're looking at. It can be lower than normal when looking at the whole population that is vaccinated but high on a specific group of this population.

In this case, the fact that there might be complications specific to an specific age group and potential specific to women might be a hint that there's indeed a problem that was not seen. It does not mean that the vaccine is not safe, but it might be not safe in specific circumstances, like a lot of medications already are.

Just spitballing here, but it might be possible that these individuals have an immune system that is pre-disposed to an auto-immune attack on their platelets. If so it might have happened eventually anyway (hence no deviation from normal stats), but the vaccine happens to trigger it pretty consistently. If so, and if the thrombosis turns out to be treatable like the German researchers think, then getting the AZ vaccine might turn out to be a relatively safe, controlled way for people with the condition to find out that they have it (compared to something else triggering it at some random time where they are not on the lookout for symptoms, and thus more likely to die from the blood clots). All theoretical at this point, but it would be a pretty good outcome if this side effect of the vaccine in reality turns out to become a screening method for a previously unknown condition.

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