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Comment by HMH | Hacker News Reader

I wish German media were as meticulous about reporting adverse side effects of the vaccines against COVID-19 as they are with reporting about the dangers of COVID-19 itself.

The above findings are currently prominently displayed on tagesschau.de [1], whereas you can't even find the current number of suspected deaths after vaccinations (currently 1919 deaths after vaccination in Germany [2]) using the search utility [3]. Please note that this number is indeed newsworthy as this is the first update in months regarding deaths after vaccinations.

[1]: https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/uke-studie-corona-101.html

[2]: https://www.pei.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/newsroom/dossiers...

[3]: https://www.tagesschau.de/suche2.html?query=1919&sort_by=dat...

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> I wish German media were as meticulous about reporting adverse side effects of the vaccines against COVID-19 as they are with reporting about the dangers of COVID-19 itself.

Why?

In my experience, this is typically a "dog whistle" type statement that people who are anti-vaccination espouse. Conversation, when it does occur, will often lead to something like VAERS shows X,Y,Z (but without comparison of incidence to baseline population).

Post hoc ergo propter hoc... they are not suspected, they are possible.

Well, the security report itself talks about suspected cases (Verdachtsfallmeldungen in German), so I guess it's fair to call them that:

> In 1.919 Verdachtsfallmeldungen wurde über einen tödlichen Ausgang in unterschiedlichem zeitlichem Abstand zur Impfung (0 Tage bis 289 Tage) berichtet.

Also note that not every death after vaccination is reported, you need to fill a document with your symptoms [1]. So these are indeed very much suspected cases of adverse side effects / deaths.

[1]: https://nebenwirkungen.bund.de/nw/DE/home/home_node.html

> Also note that not every death after vaccination is reported, you need to fill a document with your symptoms

Suspected severe reactions (and death certainly is that!) are not primarily self-reported, since there is a legal requirement for doctors etc to report them.

Covid deaths afaik are “death while having Covid”. Do you see a reason to apply a different standard to vaccines?

Frankly, I'm a bit puzzled by this comment. Either you are going for the comedic value, or you are actually serious in which case I am not sure where to begin to address your comment if by now you have not yet realized the difference between dying vaccinated and dying while COVID positive.

On the off-chance that it is the second, and that you are really serious:

'Death while having COVID' does not equate 'death by COVID', it merely is something that is registered. A death certificate lists conditions around the time of death, and being COVID positive may (or may not, not everybody is tested, after all) result in a mention on the death certificate.

If COVID is a part of the chain that led to the person dying then you are likely to see something mentioned in the area that is related to the cause of death, likely an infection with COVID will be listed there as well as for instance pneumonia, the direct cause of death.

With the vaccines and their side effects, something similar happens: there is the possibility of a link, and when such a link is confirmed then that will cause all kinds of feedback loops to engage, which if the evidence points to the cure being worse than the disease may even lead to the vaccine being taken off the market, or, alternatively, to be restricted in its distribution based on whatever demographics turned up to have an adverse risk profile.

I hope that answers your question, and that you understand now that there is really only one standard here.

No need to insult my sincerity, the HN guidelines are perfectly clear - assume good faith. If you can’t just don’t reply at all, no need to trash the venue.

Back to the topic at hand, you maybe right about what the death certificate says, but I am more concerned with what counts as a covid death in statistics. The CDC is pretty clear about that - any death where covid contributed is a covid death. Getting hit by a truck won’t count, but pneumonia certainly will. It seems that any cause of death that could come from covid is counted as covid death as long as the deceased was infected.

Coronavirus disease deaths are identified using the ICD–10 code U07.1. Deaths are coded to U07.1 when coronavirus disease 2019 or COVID-19 are reported as a cause that contributed to death on the death certificate.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/tech_notes.htm

Likewise I would expect death from vaccine to be, statistically speaking, any death by a vaccine-related cause within two weeks of being vaccinated. Perhaps my expectations are wrong, but they are certainly not unreasonable.

Apologies for not taking you 100% serious at first, but I did make an attempt at answering your question. There are a lot of people that ask questions like that just to make fog, rather than to serve as an actual discussion point, forgive me for lumping you in with them, it has happened too often as of late to not wonder about these things.

Your expectations are very unreasonable. With a vaccine drive hitting 100's of millions of people in a very short time and with on average thousands of people normally dying of other causes, the assumption should be that some people that are vaccinated will die of natural causes within a reasonably short time.

After all, those causes don't suddenly go away within two weeks of being vaccinated. Some percentage of those people would have died anyway within those two weeks. The vaccine drive was spread out quite a bit but even so you can rest assured that any deaths that are even remotely suspicious (say, not a car accident, or someone falling to their death) are going to be looked at for patterns that lie outside the statistical expectations. Nobody would benefit from an unsafe vaccine, witness the care around AZ and Janssen when there was suspicion that these vaccines may cause disproportionate side effects.

So only excess deaths from COVID and excess deaths from vaccinations (which is a vanishingly small number utterly dwarfed by the COVID related deaths) should be counted, not the normal ones.

Base rates for a number of causes of death to give you an idea:

https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/rHNYs/10/

So if someone has Covid and gets run over by a train, is that reported as a Covid death (serious question)? Or are only deaths due to a medical reason (heart failure, stroke, etc) reported as such, since there is a possibility of them being linked?

> So if someone has Covid and gets run over by a train, is that reported as a Covid death (serious question)?

No.

German reporting is based on the local health agencies reporting deaths either "caused primarily by COVID" or "with COVID as a contributing factor" (last I saw in a ratio of about 80:20, some sampling with autopsies suggests that's not totally off but the samples aren't all that large), with almost always the aggregate number being reported because the distinction can be very difficult to make. (EDIT: although official overall cause-of-death statistics still go by primary reported cause, and thus exclude the latter part)

Any death where covid contributed. So, no train wrecks, but death from pneumonia-while-covid is counted as death by covid.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/tech_notes.htm

> but death from pneumonia-while-covid is counted as death by covid.

As well it should be, because the base rate for pneumonia is well known and is taken into account when reporting these stats.

I linked you an example in another comment.

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