Comment by kossTKR | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kossTKR | Hacker News Reader

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This makes zero sense to me from a stats point of view.

Denmark has only had 11 deaths in total in the age bracket [0-60], without known underlying conditions. Most of them close to sixty and overweight.

4 [0-60] bracket women have already died in Norway, and 2 in Denmark with one 30 year old in intensive care. All healthy relatively young health workers, a group of people that have simply not died from Covid.

Norway has zero deaths below 60 without underlying conditions, and 4 deaths from the vaccine. So it's only the vaccine killing healthy people. Same in Denmark. You won't find a single dead healthy 50 yr woman among the dead.

All the data is publically available. It's almost incomprehensible to me that people don't understand that Covid almost exlusively kills 80+ people, or with many comorbidities.

Close to zero healthy people below 60 have died from Covid in the west. Sacrificing 4 healthy people after only 120K vaccinations in NO is crazy. Or 2 after 140K in Denmark with one in critical.

I wouldn't take the AZ vaccine. There is about a in 1 / 25000 of sudden death for a healthy|<60 person compared to zero with Covid at the moment.

1 / 25000 chance of dying is crazy high for a 30 year old, and here we haven't even counted non fatal haemorrhages which is higher.

Three points:

1: 7.86% of all deaths in the UK were under 60 [1]. Unfortunately, I don't see any data on comorbidities easily available, but I'd expect similar rates of them in the UK vs NO, DK, etc. and so I'd expect similar rates of death in the agre groups. Note that I don't doubt your general point that covid is vastly more deadly to the elderly, but I do not believe 1 in 13 supports your statement that "close to zero healthy people below 60 have died from Covid in the west".

2: Considering deaths alone is a woefully inadequate measure of the impact of covid on people. There's countless reports of ongoing issues [2] after 'recovery', and we have absolutely no idea what the long-term implications are. By letting it pass through populations with a low mortality rate, you're gambling against possible long-term health implications that will impact whole populations on an ongoing basis.

3: I am not sure how your 1 in 25,000 rate of sudden death matches with the fact that England has vaccinated 6,169,566 people under 55 [3] as of 14/03. Your rate would imply we'd have seen close to 250 sudden deaths out of England alone. A cursory search doesn't find me any numbers, so please point me towards any you may have, but I would be astounded if news media weren't reporting on that sort of rate of deaths.

I'm not going to pass judgement either way on the equations of how many vaccine-related deaths are comparable to 'natural' covid deaths or long-term illnesses, however I felt those three points were worth making, particualrly given they affect fundamental assumptions you make, or data you cite.

[1]: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-%20work-ar... - "COVID 19 total announced deaths 21 March 2021" spreadsheet

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_COVID

[3]: https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas... - "COVID-19 weekly announced vaccinations 18 March 2021" PDF

All of you points are reasonable, but less so considering we can wait a few weeks and eliminate the risk with another vaccine like Pfizer/Biontech.

As the other posters of sources show, this is a very rare kind blod failure that only hits 1/3000000 people, and often leads to death. Not just a little blod clots.

German research says 7 times the amount of blod clots in AZ vaccinated already against background:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/it-s-very-special-pi....

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

My line of thinking at the moment is:

1) Seems right. It's about 5% in DK/NO. [1]

Comorbidities is about 90% in DK for deaths, this is pretty much the pattern everywhere.

In other words only about 10% percent die without "known" comorbidities - but very importantly obesity is excluded here often - it's relatively rare to find in-shape healthy "younger" people dying - that's why it becomes sensational.

I only have comorbidity sources in danish (unstrained system), but to compare to the UK this is the pattern seen in "strained" public health system - from after the NY first wave meltdown[2]. Notice how few without comorbidities. Only 17 in the age group 18-44, in 15000 deaths.

Today the NYC numbers have doubled so lets extrapolate and say 34 people have died in the age group 18-44. If 3/4 of those where obese which is pretty likely[3], then we end up with about 9 deaths out of 50000 in the 18-44 bracket in NYC, a heavily strained city with 8.5 million inhabitants.

Not zero, but seriously bordering on it noise and scale wise.

2) Considering above ratios 4 deaths per 150.000 in the 0-60 bracket, and problems with non fatal haemorrhages that often leaves people completely handicapped still seems worse in a "semi experimental" vaccine without large scale testing yet. Again 4 healthy people have already died, two in their thirties in Norway. That just doesn't happen statistically with DIC haemorrhages.

3) The main theory is bad batches, or bad laboratories. The UK makes its AZ vaccines in completely different labs than the rest of Europe. Could also be genes, diet, local medications etc. No matter what - the "lets just divide the NO/DK/DE" high death rates into the succesfull UK vaccinations is extremely dishonest. Right now the numbers look bad in both Norway, Denmark and Germany this is why there is already several specialists that are alarmed independently in NO/DE (see first sciencemag article).

[1]https://www.ined.fr/fichier/rte/166/Page%20Data/Norway/Norwe...

[2]https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/pdf/imm/covid-19-d...

[3]https://www.worldobesityday.org/assets/downloads/COVID-19-an...

-- disclaimer, i am not against vaccines, and would gladly take the Pfizer vaccine at the moment at least. Also seems to have way less side effects after vaccination like fever/shaking/headache/vomiting. Everyone i know who's taken the AZ vaccine has been very sick for a few days (nurses/doctors), no side effects from the pfizer vaccine - anecdotally i know.

Thank you for the comprehensive response. All of your points are fair and I like your logic.

Particularly, you make a good point regarding differing manufacturing locations and possible batch issues. I did not consider that. It wasn't my intention to be dishonest, but I agree that it was flawed logic to think ti would necessarily apply.

What it does highlight, though, is that it's reasonable to consider this particular batch/source of the AZ vaccine to be risky, but I think then it's important to then stress that "The AZ Vaccine" in general temrs is not automatically undermined by this, since evidence clearly demonstrates that other locations have used it successfully without this issue. To me, this is an important distinction to draw since without it, public confidence in the AZ vaccine as a whole is undermined.

Public rejection of vaccines other than Pfizer & Moderna is a particular concern of mine, as I believe the Pfizer & Moderna vaccines have a much higher barrier to manufacture, so there's much less ability to scale them in the short-to-medium term. As far as I'm concerned, we need vaccines such as from AZ, J&J, etc. to be able to produce vaccines at the scale necessary to move from only vaccinating the elderly in 1st world countries, to vaccinating 7+ billion across the entire globe.

As an aside, I really appreciate that this discussion was fact-based, respectful and open-minded. It's an incredibly refreshing change compared to the overwhelming majority of other vaccine-related discussions I endure! Thank you, to you and to the HN community in general for this quality of discourse.

All fair points, - i also appreciate the quality discussion!

Luckily a myriad of vaccines are on their way with differing technologies. As far as i know many of them "better" in various ways, so i hope we at some point are going to get something very robust, even for variations - but that also makes it so important to be extremely cautious in the meantime - as with the current AZ vaccine in the northern regions.

Regarding your third point, you are baking in an assumption that the UK AZ vaccine is the same as the EU vaccine, but they made in different facilities.

There could be a manufacturing issue that causes this. There could be a genetic issue that causes this. There could be a drug interaction issue that causes this. There could be an issue with how the doses are being injected.

Or it could be a total coincidence and these issues were caused by something else.

Regarding your first point, the chances of dying from COVID in the USA if you are under 20 are like 1/100,000 if you have no pre-existing conditions. All people under 40 is probably higher than that, but I wouldn't take that AZ shot if there was a 1/25,000 shot of dropping dead. I certainly wouldn't give it my children. I'm not saying those are the odds of dropping dead from the AZ shot, but if they were, its not worth it for younger people.

Have you seen the ICNARC data? https://www.icnarc.org/Our-Audit/Audits/Cmp/Reports

It gives details of patients admitted to ICUs, and the patient characteristics gives numbers of people who needed no support in day to day activities, or needed some assistance, or needed full assistance.

That's not quite co-morbidity, because people with asthma or high blood pressure or obesity will often need no assistance.

I had not, thank you. Being from Australia, my main exposure to data is one that tells a major success story with thankfully very few data points for deaths. I intentionally avoided citing the Aussie data for that reason (indeed, I started using it then swapped to UK data becuase 900 fatalities total is not really a broad sample size for understanding mortality rate < 60), but it then meant I was trying to find data I wasn't sure existed, on sites with which I'm unfamiliar.

As a moderate chronic asthmatic, it's been interesting to see that it is not a co-morbidity as people first assumed. I've also struggled to find good data on it, so this will make for interesting reading. I appreciate you sharing it!

Sometimes I wondered if I was completely alone in this madness. Nice to see I'm not alone. Thank you!

Has causality been established between vaccines and the 4 deaths?

I don't know about Norway, but for Germany there have been preliminary results published, which indicate that the cerebral venous sinus thrombosis cases were indeed caused by immune reaction.

Article (in German): https://www.spektrum.de/news/astrazeneca-impfstoff-immunreak...

Not sure about Norway but the case in Austria that started all that was an immune reaction to the vaccine: https://noe.orf.at/stories/3095633/

This is a few days old now so doesn't include the latest Norwegian cases, but that seemed to be the thinking (though the article feels a bit of a mix between certain and equivocal at different points).

https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/KyGv2G/professor-says-...

Not in the published, peer reviewed sense. But the group of doctors at Rikshospitalet, that treated some of these patients, is confident that the vaccine is the only plausible explanation.

https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/KyGv2G/professor-says-...

Quoting from the somewhat poorly translated VG article:

>"We have the reason [for the blood clots]. And there is no other thing than the vaccine which can explain that we have this immune response, says Holme."

>"[...] we have no other history with these patients that could create such a severe immune response. I am confident that these antibodies is the reason, and I see no other reasons than it being the vaccine that triggers it"

Original, in Norwegian: https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/QmwR1V/professor-om-mi...

Let's assume there is causality. So what? I have the impression people are just bow realizing that every drug comes with a piece of paper, that includes all known, and in a lot of cases potentially deadly, side effects. But nobody stops taking Asperin, paracetamol and other things.

All that was achieved by extensive media coverage of AZ was, that authorities and doctors are kind of obliged to announce every issue with it. And that these issues are just plain overblown. And again hyped by media.

That changes a lot of things. For one, this side effect was neither known nor documented, so people could not make an informed decision before getting the vaccine.

Then individuals have a quantifiable risk of dying from COVID vs. dying from the vaccine. Depending on age/sex/comorbidities/medication/etc. one of the other may be higher.

Also from a public health perspective, if these CVST cases are known to be mostly limited to a particular group (women under 50) and the vector vaccine, then this group could be vaccinated with other types like mRNA vaccines.

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