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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps they should close their roads too, because people die from traffic accidents ...

There are a lot of vehicles that we don't operate on public roads, for safety reasons - if you want to go "down that road".

Denmark (along with the other Scandinavian countries and the UK) have almost the lowest traffic-related death rate in the world too.

As far as I can tell, Denmark are reporting such a high rate of death from the AZ vaccine relative to the number of doses deployed, that the risk would actually be quite bad compared to driving. However, the absolute numbers are tiny so the uncertainty is enormous. It's quite possible they were just unlucky.

The number of traffic-related fatalities in Denmark is around 200 per year, see e.g. [1]. Blood clots appear in 4 per 1M people (UK numbers, [3]) or 10 per 1M (Denmark numbers, [2]). That would mean about 24 to 58 Danish people would get blood clots from their first shot. Denmark had 2447 covid deaths, [4]. If you zoom in on certain age-groups, then perhaps Denmark's decision could still make sense, though.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/573861/number-of-traffic...

[2] https://www.thelocal.com/20210318/ten-blood-clot-cases-found...

[3] https://cosmosmagazine.com/health/medicine/covid-19-vaccinat...

[4] https://github.com/CSSEGISandData/COVID-19

The history of medical ethics is interesting. We’ve sort of drifted from pure utilitarianism. One problem is that since everyone dies eventually and our statistics aren’t complete, you can usually come up with ways to justify doing pretty much anything from a utilitarian standpoint.

If we weren't using pure utilitarianism what justification could we have for using the force of the law to prevent people from taking medicines they judge will be good for their health?

[2] states:

> ten cases of blood clots have been found in Denmark in people subsequent to taking the AstraZeneca vaccine.

and later,

> A total of 140,000 people in Denmark have received at least one dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine.

If you extrapolate these numbers you would expect ~410 patients with blood clots from AZ if you gave the vaccine to everyone in Denmark.

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