> vaccine-induced immune thrombocytopenia and thrombosis (VITT)
> According to the European Medicines Agency, about 900 VITT cases have been reported after immunization with the AstraZeneca or J&J vaccines in Europe, including 200 deaths. Few data are available about the rest of the world, even though more than 3 billion doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were administered globally.
> It’s not clear whether the syndrome was rarer outside Europe or whether cases were missed. In most parts of the world, between 40% and 60% of the population has the genetic background that makes people more prone to VITT, but in East Asia the prevalence is only 20%. Other factors, too, might contribute to the rare cases when they happen.
This is such a crazy fact. I didn't know the AstraZeneca was administered at that scale. I remember the quick switch to the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine previsely as precautionary because of the AstraZeneca shot. Our (Romanian) army personal was mostly the one subjected to this vaccine.
It seems that AstraZenaca has become a scapegoat for Pharmaceutical companies, so people can say "oh it was just that one bad vaccine with one rare side effect."
Most likely a lot of medication you have taken in your live have a low probability to kill you. It's just virtually no other class of medication/vaccine has the same degree of monitoring in place so we can't even measure such rare events.
In comparison, back then I looked up the typical all cause death probability within a year for the age group 20-40 (in Germany) and it turns out, getting covid19 without vaccine increases that by 700%.
A relative increase of a very small number is still very small number. However, worse then astrazenaca and the 700% that's only death, there's a lot that is not deadly but still very bad.
The involved risks with astrazenaca makes taking it - compared to no vaccine at all - a no brainer in comparison.
Could you expand on this a bit? I don't think that AstraZeneca has suffered any reputational damage from this, it's an extremely rare event that took broad monitoring to even discover. 200 documented deaths in what are likely hundreds of millions of doses is the type of thing that speaks to a very robust medical monitoring system.
> "oh it was just that one bad vaccine with one rare side effect."
What do reference by the "it" here? There were 1.2 million COVID deaths in the US alone which seems like the most notable "it" to reference but it doesn't really fit with the rest of the sentence.
This is a salient point: the mRNA method of inoculation is radically different from conventional "vaccines" as invented by Sabin and Salk (peace be upon them).
The traditional vaccines rely on a large industrial supply of chicken eggs or other precursors, even human stem cells. The manufacturers of traditional vaccines need to culture trillions of colonies of virulent strains, and store those viruses colonies long enough to weaken/kill them and then assemble a vaccine with the remnants. Sorry, I meant "contain them with biohazard safety facilities and protocols" which are euphemistically known as "labs".
I found essentially no moral objection to mRNA inoculations, unless you consider that the fungible funds we pay are going to the same pharmaceutical virus factories that manufacture and store influenza, polio, pertussis, tetanus, and other dangerous organisms. It would be really cool if we, as a civilization, could move past that stage, or at least enact treaties and disarmament protocols for the nations which are stockpiling them. But somehow, the general public doesn't see it that way.
Conscription is horribly inapt metaphor for mandatory inoculation.
Banning the playing of third-party Russian roulette, where you hold a mostly unloaded gun to the head of your neighbors, coworkers, and service staff, actually more accurately represents the risks involved to both yourself and the public, and importantly to the personal tax and effort required.
what about when a veteran returns from war with ptsd that can be triggered at any point and potentially result in violence to those around them ? thats about the same net effect as walking around with a loaded gun to everyones head , the only difference is the comparability in numbers. as well the covid death rates for young people are a fraction of the death rates of the elderly, who do deserve to be taken care of but ultimately are a net drain to society. so your comment is better stated as holding a gun to the head of the elderly ... which is horrible but not quite the same argument.
You face resistance for an inflammatory and incorrect framing, not for talking about vaccine safety. Everybody was talking about the safety of vaccines, which is why many governments moved away from this vaccine in favor of others.
To complain about downvotes you should realize that people are reading your entire comment, not just the bland non-controversial parts. Playing a fake victim might be good for your feelings but it's bad for examining the truth.
ill acknowledge your attacks on my verbal expression. now do you have a rebuttal to the idea that conscription and forced vaccine mandates are comparable ? because all the mrna vaccines have fucked up side effects, moving from one to another isn't a perfect solution. regardless - ive put an idea forth for discussion, what makes you think that accusing me of playing victim is a valid method of discussing things in a productive and non inflammatory way? it seems like youre intentionally trying to bait your opponent, like the engagement bots on reddit.
There's no need to rebutt such a claim, as it's extremely broadly false. The stated level of danger is not comparable, the expectation on effort or time is completely different, the broad negative outcomes of being drafted vs the positive outcomes of a vaccine, none of those are comparable. It would be like saying "rebuke my claim that being drafted is comparable to being asked not to listen to loud music on the bus."
your comment is basically "no" which isn't a great foot hold from which to form rebuttals , i feel like id have to drink different flavors of kool aid to respond adequately , eg if one prioritized national interests over some elderly dying then your point of broad negative vs broad positive outcomes is invalid
Odds of dying from the AstraZeneca vaccine is about 1 in 50,000, or about 0.002% [0] for people over 60. In the USA there were 434,779 excess deaths [1] in the over 60 age group of 55M people, implying about 0.008% were killed by COVID. So taking AstraZeneca was the lower risk option, in the USA anyway.
In countries like Australia that largely managed to suppress COVID through quarantine and mass vaccination (using other vaccines), perhaps it wasn't the best option, and indeed Australia did opt to wait once the risks became evident. If you were in Peru or Mexico (both did a very bad job of managing COVID), if you were over 60 you would be mad not to have got the AstraZeneca jab if it was the only one on offer.
i read a study from sweden where a full three quarters of covid deaths were in the bracket of those aged 80 plus. to me this definitely impacts your proposed model of comparing vaccine vs covid deaths. thanks for introducing the constraint of governance, its a fantastic challenge and shows that my initially proposed idea isn't necessarily universally applicable.
As you can see that site doesn't have data broken down by age for Sweden so it would be interesting to see where they paper you mention got their data from. Sweden's excess deaths across all ages followed a similar curve to the USA, so it would be surprising if the age group breakdown wasn't similar too.
You can also see how well Australia managed COVID in comparison. "Excess deaths" in Australia's was driven into reverse by their management strategies. That wasn't due to vaccines. Australian couldn't buy vaccines for love nor money (aside form AstraZeneca which unlike the others could be manufactured there - but it was withdrawn very early), ironically because its other measurement strategies were so successful countries like Mexico were deemed more worthy. Those strategies were also very successful financially, with Australia emerging earlier and faster than just about all countries in the OECD. They did however cause immense friction within Australia, as some citizens deeply resented the temporary restrictions put on travel, mask mandates and the like.
your dataset is valid in the context of the argument. its hard for me as a layman to trust claims formed from such widespread sources, when i could hand wave the results away by assuming that deaths from all causes will proportionally increase among all age groups after a populace exits lockdown.
anyway that is not a real argument so ill backtrack a bit to provide a government source [0] for my previous claim. as opposed to australia, sweden let it rip. therefore of all countries, this particular dataset is the most universally applicable, since it most accurately reflects a baseline. and that baseline is an overwhelming majority of covid deaths among the elderly.
my original point was to compare conscription with a mandate forcing untested chemicals on the populace. if the chemicals were tested or if some other mandate was imparted (eg. your example of australia's management strategies), i acknowledge that this would be less apt of a comparison.
Hmm. Official statistics from an OECD government. A very trustworthy source. According to AI's it is "not* an outlier, the figures are the same for most OECD countries.
However the metric is different. I was quoting excess deaths, Sweden figures are deaths attributed to COVID. While it may true COVID caused a lot of deaths, in the elderly with a lot of comorbidities doctors had to put something on the death certificate and COVID was a popular choice at the time. But did it matter if they were going to die away? COVID killing me when I had a many good years left would be very unfortunate. Dying from COVID when I had only a few months because of other reasons doesn't concern me so much.
This means excess deaths measures something more relevant to me than measuring deaths attributed to COVID.
> with a mandate forcing untested chemicals on the populace.
I wasn't aware that any modern vaccine from an OECD country not being tested before used on a human. All COVID vaccines certainly were. The testing was necessarily accelerated, but it's unlikely the normal regime would have caught the issue with AstraZeneca.
Mandated vaccination is tricky. A healthly majority of the population with 80+ year old family members in homes is going to want the workers in those facilities to take every possible precaution, including alcohol disinfectants, masks and be vaccinated. Some of that majority were taking those same precautions in their own homes.
The same reasoning was applied to populations at less risk, at extreme kindergartens enforcing vaccination and quarritines. Where to draw the line is problematic, but in all OECD countries it was drawn well before mandatory vaccination of the entire population. That didn't happen.
ive employed the laymans heuristic that if you die with covid it is most likely what killed you, the comorbidities don't matter to me. on the surface your excess death metric makes sense but im not convinced and need time to reflect.
its too much of a coincidence for me that mrna was not viable until the very moment that it was needed. i vehemently disagree that further testing would have been redundant. moreover the non-mrna covid vaccine by novavax (released to the public less than a year after covid mrna vaccines) has a significantly better safety profile. no, mandatory vaccination of the entire population didnt happen, only the majority of able bodied workers (aka the powerhouse of the economy, hence a bit of rounding occurred when i took artistic liberty).
therefore the world could have waited a year, locked down, and not subjected its driving force to deadly peril. this did not occur, consequently the world's workers were forced to suffer so that pharma companies could make money, the world's elderly/immunocompromised could be protected, and goverments could print less money.
> its too much of a coincidence for me that mrna was not viable until the very moment that it was needed.
Shrug. Such things do happen. The history of development of mRNA crosses decades, with many wrong turns. The final tweaks needed to make it work did happen not long before COVID happened on the scene, but as COVID had not been heard of at the time I can't see how that could be have been artificially orchestrated. The mRNA developers did get extraordinarily lucky when a pandemic generate a healthy return on their decades of investment just as it became viable. Having read the history of mRNA, I don't begrudge them their luck. Individuals invested huge amounts of time, took large personal risks (to the extend of being fired for their persistence) in making it happen. Such efforts usually aren't rewarded.
> i vehemently disagree that further testing would have been redundant.
There was one recorded death to due mRNA COVID vaccines in Australia. Nearly everyone who was vaccinated in the early stages got several doses mRNA. So at the absolute best, more testing could have prevented one death there. But maybe not. Given that, your vehemently disagreement is difficult to understand.
> therefore the world could have waited a year, locked down
I don't know where you live, but in liberal Western democracies lock downs are problematic. The USA mostly failed at it as did most places. Australia did better, but babies going without food when parents weren't allowed to leave apartments effected with COVID caused a lot of angst even with people who broadly agreed with the direction the government took. Such mistakes are entirely avoidable of course, but when sudden drastic action happens fubar's are inevitable. (And it wasn't that serious because locals who weren't in a locked down zone purchased food out of their own pockets and dropped it off.)
The reality is, the enforced of vaccination for some groups of people was much easier for most Australians to swallow than those lock downs, mask mandates, enforced distancing, mandatory tracking apps on your phone, and enforced hand washing. You are in a small minority that thinks otherwise. When you look at the social and economic costs of lock downs vs mRNA vaccines (which history has shown to be very safe), the choice looks to be a no-brainer to me. China did for example did go the lock down route, and were able to enforce it because they aren't a liberal democracy. The outcome by every metric was far worse that Australia, who abandoned lock downs as soon as enough vaccines became available.
you believe in the timing of this discovery and i don't, we must agree to disagree there.
regarding the single recorded death in australia and your assertion that mrna vaccines are very safe, we are commenting beneath an article discussing otherwise, my disagreement is redundant.
regarding liberal democracies, the US has recently been executing its own citizens on the street and any government would do the same if deemed in the countrys best interests, it isnt clear why politics matter here.
regarding the ease of taking mrna vaccines, it is also easy to swallow cyanide pills. australians live a utopic life in low density housing. seems fairly clear that the average australian would accept mandates unquestioningly, furthermore that an australian lockdown would look a lot different to that of a high density country with a billion-strong population.
the reality is that we could have waited 6 months and not caused permanent damage to swathes of our world's future. this wasn't possible to fully predict at the time so i will give some benefit of the doubt. but when trillions are involved, safety of the common man is not the priority. which is also arguably the case when it comes to the gain of function research that initiated this entire situation.
> regarding the single recorded death in australia and your assertion that mrna vaccines are very safe, we are commenting beneath an article discussing otherwise, my disagreement is redundant.
No, we aren't commenting beneath an article discussing dangerous side effects of mRNA vaccines. Granted, the title might make you think that. But the article discusses one side effect: VTT. That side effect was caused by one vaccine: AstraZeneca. It is not an mRNA vaccine. As you noted, our discussion was about mRNA vaccines being responsible for a single recorded death, despite heavy use. AstraZeneca caused 8 or 11 deaths in Australia, depending on who you believe, yet distribution was limited.
> australians live a utopic life in low density housing.
It's true many Australians do live in low density housing. If you're well off I guess it life is pretty good, although I prefer the high density European cities to car centric suburbs. If you aren't so well off no place is a utopia. This summer it hit 48°C in the south. Cooler in Darwin in the north - 39°C, but 90% humidity. Australians get respite from this by going to the shopping centres, the pools or the sea, but you can't do that during a lock down.
> seems fairly clear that the average australian would accept mandates unquestioningly,
"While some protests were peaceful, others ended in clashes between protesters and police."
> furthermore that an australian lockdown would look a lot different to that of a high density country with a billion-strong population.
Maybe. You spend your time staring at your house walls or watching TV in both places. But as you say, Australian houses are bigger, so the walls would be further away /s
whoops i made the incorrect assumption that AZ was mrna. clearly it has scrambled my brain. either way my point stands that further testing would have saved young lives, which as you have noted was the tradeoff for getting the world economy back on track fast. net result seems similar to extended negotiations saving lives in war, so i still think that conscription and a mandate to take untested medicine are highly comparable.
i dont feel like arguing the lockdown point will lead us anywhere, anyway thanks for the laugh from your concluding statement
"Everybody was talking about the safety of vaccines"
Every platform on earth Shadow Banned and blocked people if you said anything other than "Safe and Effective"... Real conversation was shut down on a nation state level. Not exactly a scientific or logical way to discuss experimental injectable therapeutics.
> Every platform on earth Shadow Banned and blocked people if you said anything other than "Safe and Effective"...
Absolutely false. Safety of this vaccine was talked about all over. I did it, and I was never shadow banned.
Somehow there was enough discussion of this specific vaccine to enable a recall, even!
Search the news and it was all over at the time, found a ton of articles just now with a web search. There's so much documentary evidence to directly contradict your very weird claims.
If you were shadowbanned, it was either a very rare occurrence, or perhaps you were talking about something else?
Look, I know we're supposed to "believe women" and all, but in my personal experience every time I have followed up on the "They're censoring me for my views" thread it has not resulted in a conservative person being censored for tax policy and advocating for limited government, but instead, "you know the views" that amount to harassment. I admit I could be wrong, but my Bayesian prior from past data is pretty strong. So I'm hesitant to believe without evidence. I understand if others have a very different prior, but I can't deny my past experience.
In the past I've hesitated to even get involved with these discussions because they all seemed far too low signal to noise, and in fact lead to huge amounts of dangerous toxicity, but in these dangerous times I think it's important to interact more even if it's very unpleasant. I already got my first-ever "kill yourself" response to what was an extremely restrained comment response. We all see what goes on these discussions, we all see the common mischaracterizations, so if you want to overturn what people have seen in the past it's going to take documented evidence, I think.
this very thread is flagged, a simple link to science dot org. this directly supports the previous commenter who mentioned that these discussions are censored en masse.
im happy to keep discussing and bridge the gap between our perspectives. please understand that you came straight out the gate swinging with personal accusations in response to a hypothetical comparison, then in a later comment you engaged in the same behaviour that you accused me of, which is to say victimising yourself (by downplaying your actions and bringing up rude words others said to you). its my biased perspective, but those two in tandem make it seem like you have bad faith in the argument.
Political topics are censored en masse on HN, and this entire thread is all political, not scientific. It's so political that somebody replied to me with "kill yourself" which is something I've never experienced in my years on the internet. Much less on HN which is more buttoned up than other areas.
If you think I was "coming out swinging with personal accusations" please realize that I had very mild criticism, and I honestly do not understand how you can consider anything I said personal. It is a very inflammatory and incorrect framing! That is not a personal attack in any way. Preemptively complaining about downvotes is without a doubt playing a fake victim, which is discouraged by the guidelines.
Maybe you are not used to having your ideas challenged, but you came to a scientific subject with very political and emotional framing and inapt comparisons and saying "oh aren't I brave for making this comparison which is inapt."
This is a great science article, but seeing the exceptionally low quality political nature of the discussion here, it's quite appropriate that it was flagged. Apparently this topic is a honeypot for bad-faith and pointless political discussions that are not based in reality with parties coming in pre-aggrieved.
id apologise for expressing myself in a manner that wasn't directly related to the figures in the linked article , but that was accounted for by me initially positing that the figures themselves are the only difference in the given hypothetical. so what if my comment was an invitation to pick apart a hypothetical comparison related to the article - by saying it, i inherently ask for the idea to be challenged. since then youve attacked my language, called me self victimising, then delivered the diatribe that this comment responds to ... in other words, it genuinely appears to me as though you'd rather challenge my composure instead of the argument at hand.
if i was in your shoes id be mad so please reflect that you may not have immersed yourself in the given comparison as intended. conscientious objectors are often imprisoned and this is actually a lot more extreme than the combination of government vaccine mandate ostracization + social ostracization. your violent response is a great example of the latter.
viable non mrna vaccines were available less than a year after the initial mrna vaccines were released. we could have waited a bit and enforced something significantly less prone to unknown side effects. one last olive branch before i get flagged - aside from astronomical corporate profits, what was the advantage of subjecting the world to a science experiment?
> According to the European Medicines Agency, about 900 VITT cases have been reported after immunization with the AstraZeneca or J&J vaccines in Europe, including 200 deaths. Few data are available about the rest of the world, even though more than 3 billion doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine were administered globally.
> It’s not clear whether the syndrome was rarer outside Europe or whether cases were missed. In most parts of the world, between 40% and 60% of the population has the genetic background that makes people more prone to VITT, but in East Asia the prevalence is only 20%. Other factors, too, might contribute to the rare cases when they happen.
This is such a crazy fact. I didn't know the AstraZeneca was administered at that scale. I remember the quick switch to the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccine previsely as precautionary because of the AstraZeneca shot. Our (Romanian) army personal was mostly the one subjected to this vaccine.
reply