Widow of BBC presenter who died from Covid vaccine sues AstraZeneca | Hacker News Reader

Widow of BBC presenter who died from Covid vaccine sues AstraZeneca

independent.co.uk

21 pointsVagueMag9 comments

> "“We’re not crackpots or conspiracy theorists, we’re husbands and wives and family members who have lost somebody – that’s all it is."

The fact that they have to say this to begin with is upsetting. I have come across posts of some unfortunate people who have experienced adverse effects from these vaccines, only to see replies accusing them of being "liars" and "far-righters" (even though their post isn't even political). I even recall a meme where they took a video of someone's vaccination side effects and put comedic music over it.

This isn't just exclusive to vaccines. As a person who knows several people who have suffered serious side effects from medical treatments, I have seen way too many incidents of "it's all in your head." and "we can't quantify it, so it's not there". The result? These people lose trust in the health care system.

Sometimes giving someone the benefit of the doubt can go a long way.

The problem is that at the time if you took every social media "report" of adverse effects seriously you'd have expected half the population to die of those vaccines. That clearly hasn't happened so there was definitely a bullshit/misinformation problem, and a healthy dose of skepticism was warranted. Sucks for the single-digit percentages of real cases though.

The skepticism was waaaaayyyyyy off from a "healthy dose," for most of 2021 the standard line was something like "a billion doses of this vaccine have been administered and there have been absolutely zero deaths." Almost every patient who suffered side effects in the first year or so has a story to tell about their doctors insisting that--if it wasn't all in their head to begin with--it must have been caused by anything but the pristine COVID vaccines.

And that's without getting into the manufacturers rigging the safety results of the trials by e.g. yanking Maddie de Garay from the adolescent cohort after she was paralyzed.

Just searched for her name, and the first result was a NBC news article titled "Covid vaccines for children are coming. So is misinformation". Nowhere in the article is her name even mentioned. I'm curious as to how this is my first search result on Google.

Now back to her case, the law firm's page about this case says that doctors initially said "Maddie’s Anxiety Is Causing Her Symptoms". Then, "the hospital referred Maddie to psychologists as they believed that Maddie’s symptoms arose from her anxiety."

This directly matches the dictionary definition of "gaslighting".

I've lost count of how many times I've heard doctors attributing something they don't know/understand to "anxiety". A genuine question - how is the notion of a serious side effect dismissed and considered "correlation", yet anxiety is absolutely ruled as "causation"?

Yeah de Garay is an interesting case because there are no articles deboonking her particular case as having been caused by the vaccine. I've been surprised they didn't at least find some tout doctor somewhere to say, "there is no evidence that de Garay's symptoms were caused by the vaccine," but maybe in this particular case the usual denials would just be too flimsy and suspect. But it should be a huge slap in the face to anyone operating from a mindset of "if there were any big issues I would have heard about them" -- the adolescent trials were so small that if her adverse event had been properly included, the vaccines clearly would have been too hazardous to administer in that age group.

> A genuine question - how is the notion of a serious side effect dismissed and considered "correlation", yet anxiety is absolutely ruled as "causation"?

Even better: the same side effects are invariably attributed to post-infection sequelae in anyone who had a breakthrough case!

Many more people die from taking over the counter pain killers ever year, but few people take any notice the death is a potential side-effect of paracetamol or Ibuprofen!

The problem is that side effects are massively over reported. I don't have the original source, but I came across a report on a double blind test of one of the COVID vaccines where 50% of the participants received the vaccine verses 50% who received a placebo (saline). I that particular study more than two thirds of the participants reported side effects. Unfortunately most of the time that people do report side effects they aren't real; which creates bias in society and the medical community.

Administering a vaccine to a large population is rather like the trolly problem, as to protect a large number of people you will have to risk a small number of casualties and deaths.

Except that, once it had become clear that population immunity was not going to happen through vaccination, what happened? Yep... they ignored it, and continued to insist on vaccination.

They could have opened up. At least the risk taker would then have been able to make an informed choice for themselves.

But no. That would have meant a climb down. Better to continue with those casualties and deaths — its was only a small number after all.

It's pretty amazing that after it has become unambiguously clear that there are no herd immunity benefits at all to be realized from the COVID vaccines, many still have the perspective that there is some communal protection benefit that one contributes to by taking the shots.

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