AstraZeneca approval in the US

The Quarantine Zone
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I do not peg that odds anywhere at the moment, but it is clear from the link I posted that there is likely to be a significant figure for those infected.

There would be two levels of concern, one for those who had severe symptoms requiring medical intervention - perhaps a stay in hospital - which I would expect to have higher incidence and more severe incidence of long Covid.

The other would be for the general population - although at much lower risk of death there may be a risk of long Covid.

It means there are still a lot of unkowns, the idea of herd immunity from infection is a very bad idea for now if vaccination is available.

The most extreme nation at present for such an outlook is Brazil, where Coronavirus is now running largely unchecked - some controls in some areas are virtually as good as having no controls whatsotever since the virus only respond to opportunity and not beliefs.

For now we would be wise to assume that slow vaccine rollout, vaccine denial and institutional vaccine delays are all highly undesirable and that vaccination should be the absolute priority - slowing down vaccinations due to political stupidity or false alarms are likely to be harmful to more people than stopping programs based on there merest whiff of perhaps maybes in the face of increasing evidence of short and longer term harm is senseless.

That does not mean that vaccine reactions should not be monitored and investigated, it means were stop playing at Chicken Little with the sky falling in.

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It’s not really my concern as I don’t have a medical or statistical background. If I did I still wouldn’t have the research data that came out of the investigation.

it was the concern of European medical groups who discovered a much higher number of CVST cases than expected. Remember, this is something that happened in a very short period of time. I would imagine they were worried that a very rare and deadly condition so early in the life of the vaccine needed to be immediately vetted to ensure it isn’t going to spool out of control.

Again, they have other options currently in use. The virus is not deadly to most people so exposing them to something that “is” doesn’t make sense. It’s also likely that the most vulnerable to covid would be similarly vulnerable to a defect in the vaccine.

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Whose response was very different to many other medical groups around the world who did not recommend a pause in vaccination.

where “much higher” refers to a relative not an absolute number. i.e. a tripling of a 1 in a million rare event still means it is a rare event. In order to make a proper risk/benefit analysis you have to be aware of that.

but also against a background of tens of millions of doses administered and substantial data gathered on the adverse events seen.

Bolding mine. You said it yourself, very rare. Vetting it is the right thing to do and was being done anyway as it always is once the data shows a signal.

But they don’t have enough to plug the gap!

Perhaps in the future but not during the period when the vaccine was paused. Are you completely ignorant about the state of the EU vaccine roll-out? The AZ jab is forming a substantial part of the roll-out. Stopping using it, even for just a week, leaves people unprotected. They didn’t magically conjour up additional doses instead.

If you cannot concede that critical point then you are incapable of making an assessment of risk v benefit.

The group of people left unvaccinated are right now at much greater risk of catching Covid and dying than they ever were of a rare blood clotting event that may be caused by a vaccine.
If you are not conceding that then we are not even speaking the same language.

Is it? how did you come to that conclusion?
It may be possible of course but the data of adverse events doesn’t clearly show such a pattern. In fact the adverse effects of most concern seemed to be happening in younger and less at risk people.

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You keep saying this, when it’s obviously not true. The entire world is facing a severe shortage of covid vaccine. Even the UK and the US, which managed to get to the front of some distribution lines, have not fully vaccinated most of their population, and the EU are only beginning to. The bottleneck is availability of vaccine, not ability to distribute and administer it. I dunno where you live, but I’m in the US, and tons of people are anxiously waiting to be allowed access, or fighting for a spot on 15 different web sites. Europe doesn’t have anything in hand to use to replace those AZ doses.

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Please provide a cite for this claim. Thanks.

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This is certainly true in NJ. where our capability to administer the vaccine far outstrips the availability. I got my second dose last week (yay!) and there was almost no line for the second dose. For the first dose, there was literally no line – it took me 25 minutes from beginning to end (checking in, getting the vaccine, waiting 15 minutes for any adverse effects). I would wager that NJ could be administering 50%-100% more vaccines daily if there were supply. If a few people had some rare reaction to, say, the Moderna vaccine and they paused that one, it would cripple the vaccination effort.

Things are much worse in Europe, where they really bet big on AZ.

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There’s a big vaccination site near me that’s was designed to administer 5000 jabs per day, but has never had enough vaccine to book more than 1500 people. I think that’s common.

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Governor Murphy (of NJ) is all excited about a coming influx of doses. We had a slow start here in the “Garden” State, but we’re moving along nicely now.

OK, back to the AZ approval process in the US.

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\we’re talking about Europe. and barring some clairvoyance on your part this was deemed necessary to avoid a serious problem in the future.

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We are talking about Europe, and Europe does NOT have a stash of other vaccines to swap in to replace the AZ vaccine that many nations paused.

I don’t have a strong position on whether they should have paused, as I don’t claim to know all the facts. But I DO know that the pause meant a massive delay in vaccination for the affected nations, because they DON’T have other vaccines to use instead. They are scrabbling to get as much vaccine as they can. So no, they don’t have “other options”. Unless your idea of “other options” is “they can just let enough people catch it to develop herd immunity that way.” And if that’s what you mean, you ought to be explicit about it.

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I never said they had a stash. I said there were other vaccines available. The advantage of funding more than one vaccine is that it spreads the risk of any problems that arise.

And I haven’t read anything about Astrazeneca stopping production so that would be available after the pause.

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No there aren’t, at least not at the moment. That you continue to refuse to acknowledge that fact is just beyond understanding. Either you are completely ignorant of the vaccine rollout in Europe or you’re just being obtuse.

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That’s the problem, other vaccines may exist, but they are not available or are awaiting approval with the notorious EU approval system that has already failed.

Worth noting, EU actually does have vaccine avaiable but is struggling to distribute it or for people to take it up - all the nonsense the politicos have made on spurious concerns has damaged EU public confidence.

You have to realise that the EU is a cabal of independent nations - all of which have varying decisionmaking procedures and expert licensing authorities and that means making decisions are rarely done in the EU parliament directly - those proposals have to be taken back to the various EU partners and approved, but of course that means it is impossible to coordinate all the decisionmaking due to whatever else might be taking place in each EU nations own senates where other business is being discussed.

The whole EU process on vaccines has been a lesson in why cross nation committees are poor tools in emergencies that drop in without prior planning. They took time to agree a protocal about vaccine commissioning, distribution, contracting and pricing - they developed a set of guidelines which all took time and then empowered the EU to work on the behalf of all EU member states - sort of devolving vaccine procurement powers.

This all delayed the process, and then further delays were added in approval, and further delays have been added in scaremongering.

This is why other nations have obtained vaccine sooner and are running mass programs - the UK had a pretty poor policy in general over Covid, lockdowns too late, too little lack of testing, tracing and rubbish border controls and this is reflected in bad Covid mortality rates, however the only thing they did get right was to commission ansd procure vaccine and run a mass vaccination program.

Macron has the unmitigated gall to blame UK for EU’s own failures and it is transparently obvious he is trying to shirk of the failures of the EU to his public.

There are absolutely loads of links on EU failures in the procurement of vaccine gooing right to the beginning of this year, this crisis in the EU is not something that happened in the last couple of weeks, it has been months in the making.

The EU did rather better than UK in controlling the virus and it seems to me they did not percieve the urgency of the situation - so when other more infectious variants of Covid emerged in late January 2021 they were not in a position to deal with the sudden uptick in cases - whereas UK made such a mess of it that it grabbed at any opportunity and treated it as a much more serious and immediate emergency and threw money at it.

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I don’t disagree that the European Union dropped the ball on vaccination procurement and there is also public distrust of the vaccine(s) but that’s an aside to the medical discovery of an unusually high rate of CVST incidences. And that company has demonstrated a less than stellar accounting of it’s procedures.

It was necessary to establish a level of safety after the anomaly was discovered. Failure to do so would jeopardize a timely redirection of production of the other vaccines and damage an already tenuous public view of the vaccines.

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For God’s sake, man, the “unusually high rate of CVST incidences” is a couple dozen cases over the space of a month. Over a thousand Europeans are dying of Covid every damned day!!

Your refusal to acknowledge the context here is beyond mind-blowing.

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You should form the League of Internet Scientists and make your

If you can cite your medical and statistical evidence to back up your conclusion ahead of the European scientists who investigated this then you should form The League of Internet Posters and offer your services.

If you can’t then you’re posting opinion without evidence and you’re doing it after the fact.

There’s your context.

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Literally no one is suggesting it shouldn’t have been investigated. The question is whether it should have been investigated while vaccinations continued, it whether it was alarming enough to preemptively pause vaccinations. And while many nations paused, many others didn’t, despite having exactly the same information as the time.

I believe the decision was political, not scientific. (Both the decision to pause and the decision to plow ahead.)

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The question requires information and skill to advance to an actionable state. If there was a problem with the vaccine or it’s production then they have to determine if it will accelerate over time. This is the concern they were dealing with. The conclusion people are making in this thread appears to be: “not enough dead bodies occurred to warrant a pause in vaccination”.

You’re assuming every nation distributed the vaccine the same way and that’s not the case. The UK distributed it at a higher ratio to the elderly than other nations. They were seeing this in younger age groups elsewhere and the numbers didn’t line up.

Belief is a key point in this discussion. I’m trying to point out lack of information and the skills needed to make the conclusions given in this thread.

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But some of the information is publicly available. For instance, cases in Europe are rising, and 3000-4000 people are dying of covid in Europe every day. So every day they delay vaccinating people, they extend the risk for all the people who would otherwise have been vaccinated, and it’s a pretty substantial risk right now.

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Yes, some of the information is publicly available.

Yes, and that risk varies greatly by country.

Highly skilled people were engaged in risk assessment based on their investigation. That involved information not available to the public.