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Comment by kjakm | Hacker News Reader

"In total, 30 people out of 18 million vaccinated by 24 March had these clots. [in the UK]"

"There have been two cases of CVSTs after Pfizer in the UK, out of more than 10 million vaccinated, but these did not have the low platelet levels."[0]

So currently a one in half a million chance of being effected. For comparison 1 in 1000 women per year taking the contraceptive pill have a chance of a blood clot. Obviously this is a new drug and should be scrutinised, better understood, and if possible fixed - but at what point do we consider the daily articles scaremongering by people with an agenda?

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56620646

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You don't have to trust (British) journalists to get the numbers. You can look it up in the Eudra Vigilance database yourself. Follow this (you might have to agree to some disclaimer at some point)

https://www.ema.europa.eu/en/human-regulatory/research-devel...

Find link with "European database for suspected adverse drug reaction reports.",

click Human,

click "en",

click "Search for report",

click "Suspected adverse drug reaction reports for Substances"

click "C"

search for "COVID-19 VACCINE ASTRAZENECA (CHADOX1 NCOV-19)"

click tab "Number of Individual Cases for a selected Reaction"

select "Nervous system disorders" from the dropdown

select "Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis" from the list

You get this: https://ibb.co/VDbYXpC

107 cases, 22 dead, 5 recovered (as of 3rd April). Note that UK doesn't put their numbers in this database so these adverse events are only out of the EU doses.

For extra fun look up Pfizer or other vaccines or other side effects like general brain hemorrhaging or strokes

I think the clots from contraceptive pills that you refer to are considerably less deadly than CVST. I don't know how the numbers stack up, I suppose indeed contraceptives are more dangerous than this vaccine anyway. But in any case, you're doing an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Contraceptive pills are taken by millions of women, of course, but there is a large proportion of women (possibly a majority) that do not want to take them. Alternatives like the condom, IUD, sterilization, etc. are widespread even if they are more uncomfortable, precisely due to the pill's side effects. And no one (or no one in their right mind, at least) questions a woman's decision to not take the pill.

Here we are talking about a vaccine that your health system actively calls you to take in the context of a campaign, no alternatives are given (in the words of a politician in my country, "vaccines are not yoghurts, you cannot pick your favorite flavor"), and while you are free to refuse it, you are then called an antivaxxer, and not given any guarantees about being able to take another in the future.

The standards really cannot be the same for something that you take at your own risk among tens of alternatives versus something that you are pressured to take without even a clear guarantee of alternatives. And you cannot use contraceptive pills as a metaphor for something that people just take willy-nilly without a second thought, because plenty of women definitely don't do that.

Corresponding ratio in Norway when they called a timeout on AZ was 4 fatal cases out of 125 000 vaccinated. Similar ratio has been seen in Denmark.

I have no idea if it is a bad batch or some unusual conditions in the Nordic countries (previous vaccines administered to this cohort?) -- but it does seem to be way beyond noise.

CVSTs happen in women taking oral contraceptives at a rate of 1 in 1000 per year?

Not a doctor but that seems right to me.

Estrogen is a clotting factor and if you have elevated risk markers (like Factor V Leiden) that risk skyrockets when you add extra estrogen.

Many insurance companies get angry when you ask for blood tests to check before getting birth control (my wife was charged an extra 1k because she requested a blood screening after she learned she had a history with clotting).

I've had a cousin hospitalized for birth control related thrombosis, so again: my input could be biased here.

CVST is a rare form of stroke.

Does 1 in 1000 women taking oral contraceptives having rare strokes every year sound right to you?

No, but the original comment said 1 in 1000 have clots, not CVST.

Important to note that the blood clots from birth control are completely different than the ones from the vaccine, and are an order of magnitude or two less dangerous.

Which one is the more dangerous kind?

It doesn’t matter. People should know side effects if they can be deadly. Plenty if women don’t take the pill because of side effects and opt to use alternatives.

Just to add to your point, how many of the 18mil (mostly old or ill) people vaccinated would have had blood clot issues in the next few months anyway?

The risk is quite low for the AZ vaccine (1 death per 2 million), but the 3 that have FDA emergency authorization are even safer (zero known side effect deaths). I wouldn’t take the AZ vaccine unless I was in a high-risk group. Use the AZ vaccine on older people and the others on younger people, the risk calculus changes as you get older.

> Use the AZ vaccine on older people and the others on younger people, the risk calculus changes as you get older.

I am not sure older people would be too fond of this risk calculus. What about using "the others" on older people, and producing more of "the others" to vaccinate younger people later on?

The risk for the general population of younger people is low, they are not too afraid about the virus, and a potentially large part of them have already gotten COVID and recovered just fine. So there is no hurry in general. From what I read, people who are at risk without being extremely ill in the first place are old people and over-weight people (regardless of age). cf. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.120.051936

Older people are both less at risk from this type of clot (at least based on current data), and much more likely to die from COVID. So the risk of them dying from COVID in the time they have to wait to get an alternative vaccine is almost certain higher than the risk of them dying from a clot from the AZ vaccine.

Over a certain age, the odds of dying are higher from COVID-19 than the AZ vaccine blood clots. Ideally nobody would need to take the vaccine that has a 1 in 2 million deadly side effect, but we’re supply constrained right now.

The numbers from UK diverge a lot of those from Germany. In Germany we had 2.4m first time doses of AZ administered and 9 dead (as of 29th of March), while the UK reported 8 dead from 15m doses (as you stated: 1 in 2m).

The difference is part of the concern in continental Europe.

> Mainland Europe, for example, has given the AstraZeneca vaccine to more people under the age of 60 than the UK, which vaccinated healthcare workers and older people first, using an even split of Pfizer and AstraZeneca shots

from https://www.ft.com/content/d5cd63c6-af01-4d29-a5e5-b69ade4f3...

I would assume as UK starts vaccinating younger people it's likely to show the same impact? (also is continental europe using more AZ vaccines than UK overall?)

I think the age distribution is important. The claim is that AZ vaccine causes this rare blood clotting in people below 55 years old. Unfortunately I don't see information about this in the article.

Agree with you. And in many cases, the scaremongering is the agenda. It generates clicks. It sells ads. So the same media will try to scare you with that new virus that will kill everyone and you need to be terrified until the vaccine comes up, then tries to tell you the vaccine is terrible and dangerous. There isn't necessarily a logic behind this other than generating traffic.

> but at what point do we consider the daily scaremongering by people with an agenda?

Indeed, at what point do we consider that?

Is it after half the world has been indoctrinated into taking a several-month old experimental medicine for an illness that the overwhelming majority of people under the age of ordinary life-expectancy survive - or, more commonly - barely notice?

Or is it after we've spent so many trillions on that illness so as to be able to turn each and every one of the 9 million per year of us who simply do actually starve to death each and every year, into a millionaire?

Yes, do please tell us about daily scaremongering by people with an agenda and how bad it is for everyone, you just go right ahead and do that.

Your anti vax bullshit is wrong and misleading, on so many levels.

There's a significant difference between being reluctant to take a brand new, experimental medicine that exhibits high risk factors and low benefits, versus being opposed to vaccines per se.

Absolutely not opposed to the latter, vaccines are and have been of tremendously huge benefit to humanity.

The vaccines are new but they're not experimental. They have been through the standard trials and statistical analyses.

> The vaccines are new but they're not experimental. They have been through the standard trials and statistical analyses.

Not the full spectrum, the trials are still ongoing. That’s why they have, in the US (and the equivalent in many other jurisdictions) Emergency Use Authorizations, not regular approvals.

I'm objecting to the term "experimental".

Each of the Oxford-AstraZeneca, Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines all have Conditional Marketing Authorisation in the EU.

The EU contrasts this as being much more robust and stringent that a mere Emergency Use Authorisation.

See the section “What are the different data requirements between an Emergency Use Authorisation and a Conditional Marketing Authorisation, and what are the potential consequences of these?” https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...

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