AstraZeneca withdrawing Covid vaccine, months after admitting rare side effect | Hacker News Reader

AstraZeneca withdrawing Covid vaccine, months after admitting rare side effect

telegraph.co.uk

28 pointsgnabgib13 comments

The title of the article might lead someone to think that it's being withdrawn because of the side effect. This is not the case, as explained towards the middle of it. AstraZeneca is withdrawing its initial monovalent vaccine because it has been superseded and is no longer manufactured:

> “As multiple, variant Covid-19 vaccines have since been developed, there is a surplus of available updated vaccines. This has led to a decline in demand for Vaxzevria, which is no longer being manufactured or supplied. AstraZeneca has therefore taken the decision to initiate withdrawal of the marketing authorisations for Vaxzevria within Europe.

There were 81 admitted Thrombosis deaths, blood clots.

How many more were affected but either not fatally injured or a contributing factor to a fatality officially attributed to another cause?

Given the history of pharmaceutical products the wise move is generally to never take a product that is new, rather wait for a decade or two of market release to see if the product is actually safe and actually does something useful.

By all means, not treating each vaccine as a product on its own merits and instead wholesale giving them a pass because they were all vaccines was a bad idea. Some corporations used it to rush to corner the market with rushed products that had much more side effects than others. Pfizer (BioNtech) and Oxford (now Astra Zeneca I think, after changing name 3-4 times due to the backlash they got from the side effects) are the foremost offenders. Incidentally, Pfizer lobby was the strongest - FDA avoided approving any other vaccine than Pfizer until the quarantine ended, giving Pfizer uncontested dominance of the US market. They weren't able to prevent all competitors in the Eu, but from how the current Eu commission president (leyen) who oversaw the vaccine effort during covid is under investigation for her undisclosed secret correspondence with Pfizer lobbyists, they seem to have done a lot of work there too.

https://www.politico.eu/article/pfizergate-covid-vaccine-sca...

Whoa I didn't know that it had reached the level of 'pfizergate' until I googled to post a reference...

"Uncontested dominance of the US market"? How then did we get Moderna in early 2021?

Its hard to understand your argument: Pfizer monopolized the US vaccine market until the end of the lockdown as I said:

> In the beginning of the COVID-19 US epidemic in March 2020, sweeping lockdowns and other aggressive measures were put in place and retained in many states until end of August of 2020

> Moderna in early 2021

You will notice that date is later than the lockdown end date.

By summer 2019, Europe had around 5-6 different vaccines available. The US had only Pfizer. It remained like that until the end of the lockdown.

Something is off here. Vaccines in summer 2019 (before covid)? Pfizer available in August 2020? Timeline is wonky.

Vaccines in my memory only become broadly available April 2021 (in the US), and at that time I knew people who got Pfizer and people who got Moderna.

I may not remember the exact dates now as I didn't ever expect this to be something that would come up in any discussion. However:

> Vaccines in my memory only become broadly available

Yes, that makes a difference - the vaccines that got expedited approval were provided to 'essential workers' at the time - in the US this was only Pfizer until the harshest lockdown ended. In the Eu there were 5-6 vaccines available, however Pfizer still dominated the market.

Pfizer was granted emergency use in the US on December 11 2020, Moderna was granted the same in the US on December 18, 2020. AstraZeneca was approved first in the UK December 30, 2020 (but due to the Sept 8 trial suspension approval was delayed in the US)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_COVID-19_vaccine_de...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford%E2%80%93AstraZeneca_COV...

Yet still, Pfizer ended up dominating both markets - by delaying the approval of those that could compete and the lobbying making it so that it was the one that was bulk purchased in quantity.

When I meant approval, I meant the approval of any competitor who could provide at scale. None such vaccine was allowed until the quarantine ended. Even after that Pfizer was still being pushed against all competitors including cheaper American ones. So long story short - their lobby won.

https://archive.md/Tre6M

Uh-oh. Did they forget they could just suppress the research? /s

For real though, I can't imagine there is any financial point to having a Covid vaccine out there. There are better options now. The price pressure is downward. The effectiveness is down. Existing strains of Covid are pretty benign. Even a minor side effect at this point does not seem like it's worth the bother.

Even the original Operation Lightspeed participation ended up being a massive financial lark for the companies (at least the companies that didn't pour the investment into RNA research).

> Even a minor side effect at this point does not seem like it's worth the bother.

People have died, how is it minor? Did you mean rare?

Believe the OP's point was more like, "the vaccines wouldn't be worth taking even if only minor side effects were associated."

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