27-year-old nurse vaccinated with AstraZeneca dies in Georgia | Hacker News Reader

27-year-old nurse vaccinated with AstraZeneca dies in Georgia

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Note for US folks: Georgia, the country, not the US state.

Also to note, the US has millions of AstraZeneca doses in country, but it is not approved for use in the US.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/us/politics/coronavirus-a...

4M of those doses are going to Mexico and Canada.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/18/us-plans-to-send-4-million-d...

It doesn’t make sense for the US to be sitting on any doses of AZ at this point since Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J production capacity will exceed what we have warehoused before the FDA approval process for AZ can be completed at this point.

She died of anaphylactic shock, which is not unheard of with medications or vaccinations. It's sad, but extremely unlikely.

With over 550M doses administered worldwide (with different vaccines), total anaphylactic shock cases would have to surpass 1100 just to match the risk of being struck by lightning in a given year, which is 1 in 500,000.

Worth putting in perspective compared to the risks of dying from covid-19, if infected, which are much higher than that even for a young person.

> the risks of dying from covid-19, if infected, which are much higher than that even for a young person.

Where does your certainty come from? Are you talking about CFR, which is unreliable, or IFR, which is unknown. Or are you privy to some hidden knowledge?

https://ourworldindata.org/mortality-risk-covid?country=~GEO

The CFR. Yes that overstates the risk because you don't know how many asymptomatic cases there are. But it does not overstate it by several orders of magnitude, which is what would be required for me to be wrong.

There are lots of complications. What was her risk of contracting covid * her risk of dying, given an infection? Was she healthy or did she have an underlying, serious condition ? It's just not as simple as your post makes out. This young woman would almost certainly be alive if she hadn't got the vaccine.

People are always allergic to something. I was allergic to a particular flavor of an artificial beverage in the 80's called CapriSun, but it may have been in combination with immune exposure to pollen, dirt, flu, seasonal cold, soap, laundry detergent, or any other random substance. I broke-out in hives.

My aunt has readily-lethal anaphylactic reactions to dozens of foods and other substances.

Epinephrine, diphenhydramine, albuterol, and famotidine should be readily available at all vaccine injection sites. Even with doing everything right, people who experience medical emergencies can and do still die.

How many doses administered with this particular vaccine? You used your lighting example but it is likely to change of administered doses of AZ are significantly smaller than the 550M.

Lightning is also a bad comparison because most people try to avoid being outside during thunderstorms but anyway:

> More rarely, anaphylaxis may occur (the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has 234 reports out of approximately 11.7 million vaccinations as of 7 March 2021).

It’s rare and in most cases death is preventable with immediate medical attention.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford%E2%80%93AstraZeneca_COV...

Apparently there’s around 200 anaphylaxis deaths annually in the US:

> There were a total of 2458 anaphylaxis-related deaths in the United States from 1999 to 2010. Medications were the most common cause (58.8%), followed by "unspecified" (19.3%), venom (15.2%), and food (6.7%).

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25280385/

> Lightning is also a bad comparison because most people try to avoid being outside during thunderstorms

It's just an example very rare event that people typically don't waste time worrying over. I could have used deaths in commercial air travel or chances of winning the lottery - it doesn't really matter to the argument.

> Apparently there’s around 200 anaphylaxis deaths annually in the US.

That's less than I expected actually.

> More rarely, anaphylaxis may occur (the UK Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has 234 reports out of approximately 11.7 million vaccinations as of 7 March 2021).

It'd be interesting to know if that were high or low for a typical vaccine or medication.

your argument would make some sense if this were the only adverse type of events that existed, and if you used the total number of AZ vaccine administered, rather than total of all SARS2 vaccines, which include SputnikV, JJ, pfizer mRNA, moderna mRNA, Sinovac, etc. .

I don't have stats for just this vaccine. I think it's fine to look at the vaccines as a group - you can't choose which one you want to get anyway.

I'm trying to make a point that covid is orders of magnitude more dangerous than any of the vaccines by any reasonable analysis and at any age group. If you believe otherwise, I dare you to make your case with numbers.

I see so many people who are afraid to get vaccinated (not saying that's you), but I see precious few who can do math.

Just my opinion, there's a lot of extremism around handling covid, basically a religious reverence where no measure is too severe to prevent even one death.

But it would be a mistake to apply this thinking in reverse as well. Rare reactions to a vaccine, even if tragic, should not be cause for general alarm or be a reason to stop using it.

> basically a religious reverence where no measure is too severe to prevent even one death

What infuriates me is the Krispy Kreme promotion...if the public health establishment cared about "saving lives" they'd outlaw Krispy Kreme. And in the obesity epidemic, we see yet another example of the utter incompetence of all the educated technocrats that claim to care about our wellbeing. Newsflash: they don't. Our society is profoundly ill - something that's happened under the expert guidance and advice of the current regime that everyone glorifies.

If there was one policy that could kill the most people while seeming benign it'd be offering them a free donut every day for a year with proof of your vaccination card.

That promition is ridiculous, or at least superbly ironic.

I think though it's an example of how actual health (or quality of life which is a much more robust measure) outcomes are virtually irrelevant to policymakers.

We a just lucky when quality of life happens to coincide with large business interests (all gatherings are banned unless they're in a walmart), bureaucratic ass-covering, or vote buying. In normal times it balances out decently but the equilibrium has been thrown far off here.

There's no way to legislate self-control or common sense.

> “I call on everyone to take this vaccine,” 27-year-old nurse Megi Bakradze told the camera. They were almost her last words. Bakradze was filmed getting her AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine at the clinic where she works, Imedi (Hope), in the provincial town of Akhaltsikhe. She told the local TV reporter that lots of medications have side effects but that it wasn’t a reason to fear vaccination. Half an hour later, Bakradze fainted and went into coma.

She is now believed to be the first person in the world to die of a coronavirus vaccine-triggered allergic reaction. Her death, just four days into Georgia’s long-delayed vaccination campaign, further frightened an already skittish public. Healthcare workers, the first category of people eligible for the shots, have reportedly stopped showing up for the jabs. One clinic in the western city of Ozurgeti reported that of 13 people scheduled for vaccination on March 19, only six showed up.

Source: https://vestnikkavkaza.net/analysis/Vaccination-issues-in-Ge...

Anaphylactic shock from an allergic reaction. Here’s the list of ingredients:

COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca contains the excipients histidine, histidine hydrochloride monohydrate, sodium chloride, magnesium chloride hexahydrate, disodium edetate (EDTA), sucrose, ethanol absolute, polysorbate 80 and water for injections.

besides polysorbate 80, I cannot think of anything that could cause an allergic reaction from that list. It seems likely then that it is a strong immune reaction against the adenovirus or its spike.

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