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Comment by fighterpilot | Hacker News Reader

Why not allocate most of the Pfizer to the young and give the AZ exclusively to the older people?

Theoretically Pfizer has higher efficacy, especially with variants. Giving Pfizer to the old and AZ to the young probably saves more lives than the other way around. If you decide that you don't want to give AZ to the young any more, it doesn't follow that it's then a good idea to give it to the old, especially if you have enough supplies of Pfizer to vaccinate the old.

All the vaccines have 100% efficacy in preventing ICU admissions so far.

You should be careful comparing numbers from vaccines as they are collected in different environments; there were fewer variants present when first vaccines were on trail.

not quite

>Hospitalization data for 129 of the fully vaccinated cases is incomplete, Sutfin said. But for the 117 people for whom hospitalization records are known, 11 were hospitalized.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2021/04/06/v...

"However, since February 1, eight people with vaccine breakthrough have been hospitalized. DOH is investigating two potential vaccine breakthrough cases where the patients died."

https://www.doh.wa.gov/Newsroom/Articles/ID/2720/Cases-of-CO...

Hospitalizations are not necessarily ICU admissions.

(We should expect some ICU admissions, though. A perfect 100% is not going to hold forever, but that it's taking this long is a really great sign.)

Does Denmark actually have older people to give it to? A lot of EU countries are restricting it to over 60s only, but AFAIK the Denmark vaccine program has gone quicker than most EU ones; there may not be many if any over 60s available.

This decision delays the vaccine program with around 2 weeks 65+ will be done in the end of week 17 and 50+ in end of week 21.

In the danish source below you can on the last pages see the before and after calender with the decision.

Source in Danish: https://www.sst.dk/-/media/Udgivelser/2021/Corona/Vaccinatio...

It all comes down to guessing how to best convince the unconvinced to actually vaccinate.

People usually react badly to getting "second-class medicine", if it is mandated. (Elderly people were asking, which vaccine they would get the good-one or the bad-one, literally).

I would suggest to simply offer both to everyone and leave people the choice, if they want to risk a one-in-a-million chance of complications (for women, 0 for men AFAIK) or get the other 4 weeks later with the associated risks.

And there are people who are a bit iffy about mRNA vaccines.

Correction: The risk is not 0 for men, only a fair bit lower.

Also it's more like 1 in 100K for women with AZ. Still very unlikely so I don't understand the need for people to under state it by 10x.

From Science Table Covid-19 Advisory board to Ontario: https://covid19-sciencetable.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/S...

Which is the newest I could find on that matter.

> VIPIT seems to be rare, occurring in anywhere from 1 in every 125,000 to 1 in 1 million people

So, 1 in 100K seems to be the number to be on the safe side. But with rather rare events, it is probably hard to get an exact number there.

If I'm reading the source used by that link correctly though, the 1 million number comes from taking total number vaccinated as the denominator. My understanding was if you are a young woman, the estimate is closer to 1 in 100K. If you aren't it's probably even less likely than 1 in a million.

They used to give AZ to mostly younger people as the side effects where seen to be stronger than for the PFE.

A fear could be that when they start to give the PFE to younger people, they will see the same stuff as with AZ as it triggers the same immune response.

Pfizer has been distributed to many young people in other countries though and no such issue has popped up. Not saying it's outside the realm of possibility, but I think it's increasingly unlikely. Plus it'd be no surprise to me for the mRNA vaccines to have somewhat different side effect profile than the "traditional" ones.

It also seems that different countries have different criterias for what side effects they tolerate.

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