8 ms·

The pandemic has made me believe we need to be greater consiquentalists in our polices. It's pretty obvious that on the whole the AstraZeneca vax will save more

The pandemic has made me believe we need to be greater consiquentalists in our polices. It's pretty obvious that on the whole the AstraZeneca vax will save more people than are killed from the side effects. We don't not live in a 0 risk existence.

corndoge 6y ago
Is that obvious? If you have the choice between self quarantining and trying to avoid contracting a virus that, if contracted, has a low percentage of killing you, vs choosing to get a vaccine that also has a low percentage of killing you, why would you choose the vaccine?
- dcolkitt 6y ago
  This is like saying you should never leave your house, because you could die in a car accident. (And the chance of dying from the AZ vaccine is at most the chance of dying driving to vaccination site.)
  - corndoge 6y ago
    No, it's not like saying that
- scotty79 6y ago
  Because one "low" is few orders of magnitude lower than other "low".
  - corndoge 6y ago
    Right, but that's assuming you get the virus; to properly compare it you have to factor the chance you contract the virus in the first place. I'm not saying the math works out better, I haven't done it myself, but I'd bet most people would choose to try to avoid contracting
    - shawabawa3 6y ago
      most people in my experience are fed up of trying to avoid contracting and would rather the much lower risk of vaccine (bare in mind 10+m people have received this vaccine in the UK with no known issues)
    - Broken_Hippo 6y ago
      Yeah, I'm willing to avoid contracting the virus... by getting the vaccine, which certainly isn't as deadly as the virus has been. It isn't just the kill rate, though: I truly want to avoid the long-term complications that some folks are getting. I'll avoid the suffering that comes with the virus too, even without the complications.
    - scotty79 6y ago
      I think probability of contracting the virus eventually is highest of all the factors involved and ultimately is not that far from 1.
- Cu3PO42 6y ago
  Maybe because one probability is significantly lower than the other. Maybe because you just can't self quarantine because you cannot work from home. Maybe because you need to take care of other family members and don't want to put them at risk. There's a lot of good reasons for choosing a vaccine even if the risk isn't strictly zero. And you also need to remember that receiving vaccination isn't mandatory. If you personally aren't comfortable with the risks you don't have to get vaccinated. This makes me skeptical of the suspension, but I'm not an export on these matters and haven't done enough research to claim to have done my due diligence, so I'll refrain from either advocating for or against this step.
onetimemanytime 6y ago
Ummmm....we can wait and get another vaccine? The vaccine is done on HEALTHY people, we're not talking about meds on terminal stage cancer patients with nothing to lose.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- totalZero 6y ago
  You can also just expose yourself to the virus and build immunity that way. Up to you.
  - onetimemanytime 6y ago
    Nope. They are options, like quarantine, masks, different vaccines. It's not "this vaccine right now or death." The most sensible thing is to investigate this, maybe more without the vaccine died from thrombosis, but need to see.
  - Broken_Hippo 6y ago
    THat works great if you don't die. That doesn't work so great if you don't die and have lifelong complications, though. It doesn't work so great if you get it and kill your child/grandmother either. It doesn't work so well if you have to catch the virus multiple times to have immunity either (folks aren't always immune after catching it). Not to mention the unknowns with mutations of the virus. It is seriously much better to try to avoid catching the virus at all. The virus means you might be ok... or you might die, or you might have a lifetime of suffering that you wouldn't get with a vaccine.
    - ArkanExplorer 6y ago
      You can calculate the risk for yourself, based on data from the UK: https://qcovid.org/Calculation https://qcovid.org/Calculation eg. 30 year old healthy white male: 1 in 7,092 risk of hospitalisation, 1 in 250,000 risk of death. By contrast the risk of death from anything for a 30 year old male in the UK is 1 in 1,215: http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html Even taking a healthy 80 year old male, the risk of death from COVID is 1 in 275, whereas the annual risk of death from anything is 1 in 15.
gotoeleven 6y ago
As we have learned over the last year, doing a cost benefit analysis on anything related to covid is the equivalent of drowning your grandmother in a bathtub.
- mikem170 6y ago
  And not just financial costs, but quality of life costs. One to two years of restrictions, quarantine, and/or lockdown is a sizeable fraction of everyone's lives. I feel bad for people in countries where people are even restricted from being outdoors, despite hearing again and again that outdoors is the safest place to be.
virgilp 6y ago
In EU at least plenty of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are still incoming, so there are actually alternatives to AZ. Do not forget that these vaccines are still very new, plus there's the possibility of a production issue with the AZ vaccine that affects only part of the production; I wouldn't say it's "politically-motivated" or a dumb idea to pause AZ vaccinations until one does a deeper investigation; I personally chose to avoid AZ due to a history of strokes in my family, I preferred to reserve a spot on the Moderna list. Better safe than sorry.
- fasteddie31003 6y ago
  It's the trolly problem. Pull the lever and kill one person. Don't pull the lever and kill 3 people. I'm a lever puller.
  - hatch_q 6y ago
    But the real risk here is that the lever will get stuck. Even if 1 person dies from vaccine - it can create huge, long-lasting case against vaccination, causing more people to choose not to vaccinate and eventually killing a lot more people. There must be no doubts with vaccines, 100% trust in them is essential.
    - fasteddie31003 6y ago
      Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the great.
      - blub 6y ago
        We're not doing great at all at vaccine acceptance...
    - rleigh 6y ago
      > There must be no doubts with vaccines, 100% trust in them is essential. Completely unrealistic. Everything in life has associated risks, and vaccines do carry a (small) risk. It would be better to educate people about understanding and balancing relative risks rather than sensationalising a few outliers. The main fault here lies with the lack of proper rational discussion in the media.
isolli 6y ago
Agreed, and the same argument can be applied _against_ lockdowns (meaning measures such as mandatory stay-at-home orders that go beyond usual NPIs). I think it is slowly emerging that hard lockdowns have done more harm than good. There is no zero risk in life.
- esperent 6y ago
  There's a big difference here though - when it comes to a vaccine, we have hard stats to define the risk/reward ratio. I believe it's likely that lockdowns may cause some deaths, or possibly even lots of deaths. However, they certainly help prevent the spread of deadly disease too and hence prevent many deaths. We can probably get fairly definite numbers on how many deaths lockdown prevents in a large population. I don't think we can get similar numbers on how many they cause. My gut says they probably prevent a lot more than they cause, but I'd like to see any studies on this, if anyone has a link to share.
  - isolli 6y ago
    Fair question. In a sense, the evidence for vaccines is upfront, while the evidence for lockdowns required the careful accumulation of data. I would cite for instance the paper by Ioannidis and co-authors [0]. "In summary, we fail to find strong evidence supporting a role for more restrictive NPIs in the control of COVID in early 2020. We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures. The data cannot fully exclude the possibility of some benefits. However, even if they exist, these benefits may not match the numerous harms of these aggressive measures. More targeted public health interventions that more effectively reduce transmissions may be important for future epidemic control without the harms of highly restrictive measures." [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484
    - 5cents 6y ago
      It may not affect your main point, but a caution: The paper has received critique [1], including a letter to the editor [1] https://pubpeer.com/publications/3D81CAC483C2021C00E27C8826DF71 https://pubpeer.com/publications/3D81CAC483C2021C00E27C8826D... [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13518 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13518
xgb84j 6y ago
Yes, but those are different people that might be killed, which makes it an ethical dilemma. Depending on the type of adverse reaction, it might be safer for young people to not get vaccinated at all or with a different vaccine. (For example if the adverse reaction affects mostly young people, while COVID affects mostly older people.)
- WanderPanda 6y ago
  Thats why everyone should be free to chose to get vaccinated. It is not fair to transfer the disease risk from old/risk groups to (longterm) side-effect risks for young/healthy people
  - lxgr 6y ago
    > Thats why everyone should be free to chose to get vaccinated. Isn't that the case? At least in my country, there is no obligation to take the vaccine, and even incentives (e.g. being able to attend public events sooner) are seen very critically.
    - ktybdr 6y ago
      There are definitely people with the view that they should be mandatory and I've personally started to encounter social pressure to get vaccinated, which I don't want to do, because I lead a low-contact hermit's life and the odds of dying from COVID which I probably won't catch if I maintain my lifestyle a few more months appears to be lower than the chance I'll die from a vaccine that I definitely get For my age cohort the chance of death from either is infinitesimal but because of Bayes it might make sense to continue to avoid both, but if I try to explain that to my peers they might think I'm a Trump supporter, and as everyone knows, Trump supporters should be shunned from polite society (especially since the "insurrection"), so I see this as a choice between social excommunication and a questionable injection I don't want Fun times
      - Retric 6y ago
        Assuming your odds of catching COVID is 1 in 1,000 that’s still a higher risk for any adult age group than the vaccines. I doubt your risk of catching covid is actually that low. More importantly it’s not just about avoiding death, a bad case of COVID is terrible even if you survive. On top of this you reduce the risk of spreading it to someone else.
hnedeotes 6y ago
> We don't not live in a 0 risk existence. ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah
colechristensen 6y ago
In the US, ~160,000 people over the age of 85 have died while 216 people under the age of 18 have died. Covid represents a proportion of deaths from all causes of 13.5% for 85+ and 0.58% under 18. The trend in between the age group extremes continues in an expected way. You can't make the same decisions about risks when you have one side so skewed by age. There is absolutely no guarantee that side effects from vaccination would be a preferable risk for younger populations or that vaccination side effects would have comparable age-related effects. Covid response isn't a religion, it's not "we have to do everything" or "we shouldn't do anything", responses need reason not gut reactions.
- hef19898 6y ago
  0.58% is an order of magnitude higher then 30 out of 17 million. Going by these numbers, AZ is still better than COVID. And I doubt any worse than other vaccines.
  - colechristensen 6y ago
    That is an incorrect statistical comparison. It is 0.58% of all deaths being caused by covid. As in 994 out of 1000 people under 18 died in the same period from other things. Compared to people who are alive covid killed 0.000288% (or 1 in 350,000) under 18s. 30 in 17M is too few to have a reliable statistic, but that comes out to 1 in 567,000. If that holds, is age invariant, etc. etc. and ignoring the time-based nature of the covid deaths, taking that vaccine would represent a *50%* increase in death risk for under 18s, which is just absurdly high. (it doesn't matter that that 50% isn't exactly right, anything remotely close is an unacceptable risk) Statistics is hard.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      Wouldn't taking the 1 in 567,000 risk eliminate the 1 in 350,000 risk. Vaccine risk and disease risks don't stack. But I could be mistaken, statistics is hard you know.
      - 6y ago
h3cate 6y ago
Why put people that are at low risk from covid at risk by giving them a vaccine?
- string 6y ago
  Because it reduces transmissibility.
  - h3cate 6y ago
    Really? Do you want to link the evidence suggesting that?
    - contravariant 6y ago
      The current absence of smallpox.
    - rleigh 6y ago
      Really? We have over 200 years of vaccine use in public health programmes to control contagious disease. The most effective medical treatment humanity has ever devised. That has completely eliminated some of the most transmissible and debilitating diseases on the planet. Go and read a book on the subject, it's not like it's secret arcane knowledge. Reducing transmissibility is a basic (and bloody obvious) consequence of acquired immunity. If a vaccinated individual is reinfected, then compared to an unvaccinated individual the time to eliminate the virus is greatly reduced and the window of transmissibility is greatly reduced.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

corndoge 6y ago

Is that obvious? If you have the choice between self quarantining and trying to avoid contracting a virus that, if contracted, has a low percentage of killing you, vs choosing to get a vaccine that also has a low percentage of killing you, why would you choose the vaccine?

dcolkitt 6y ago
This is like saying you should never leave your house, because you could die in a car accident. (And the chance of dying from the AZ vaccine is at most the chance of dying driving to vaccination site.)
- corndoge 6y ago
  No, it's not like saying that
scotty79 6y ago
Because one "low" is few orders of magnitude lower than other "low".
- corndoge 6y ago
  Right, but that's assuming you get the virus; to properly compare it you have to factor the chance you contract the virus in the first place. I'm not saying the math works out better, I haven't done it myself, but I'd bet most people would choose to try to avoid contracting
  - shawabawa3 6y ago
    most people in my experience are fed up of trying to avoid contracting and would rather the much lower risk of vaccine (bare in mind 10+m people have received this vaccine in the UK with no known issues)
  - Broken_Hippo 6y ago
    Yeah, I'm willing to avoid contracting the virus... by getting the vaccine, which certainly isn't as deadly as the virus has been. It isn't just the kill rate, though: I truly want to avoid the long-term complications that some folks are getting. I'll avoid the suffering that comes with the virus too, even without the complications.
  - scotty79 6y ago
    I think probability of contracting the virus eventually is highest of all the factors involved and ultimately is not that far from 1.
Cu3PO42 6y ago
Maybe because one probability is significantly lower than the other. Maybe because you just can't self quarantine because you cannot work from home. Maybe because you need to take care of other family members and don't want to put them at risk. There's a lot of good reasons for choosing a vaccine even if the risk isn't strictly zero. And you also need to remember that receiving vaccination isn't mandatory. If you personally aren't comfortable with the risks you don't have to get vaccinated. This makes me skeptical of the suspension, but I'm not an export on these matters and haven't done enough research to claim to have done my due diligence, so I'll refrain from either advocating for or against this step.

onetimemanytime 6y ago

Ummmm....we can wait and get another vaccine? The vaccine is done on HEALTHY people, we're not talking about meds on terminal stage cancer patients with nothing to lose.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
totalZero 6y ago
You can also just expose yourself to the virus and build immunity that way. Up to you.
- onetimemanytime 6y ago
  Nope. They are options, like quarantine, masks, different vaccines. It's not "this vaccine right now or death." The most sensible thing is to investigate this, maybe more without the vaccine died from thrombosis, but need to see.
- Broken_Hippo 6y ago
  THat works great if you don't die. That doesn't work so great if you don't die and have lifelong complications, though. It doesn't work so great if you get it and kill your child/grandmother either. It doesn't work so well if you have to catch the virus multiple times to have immunity either (folks aren't always immune after catching it). Not to mention the unknowns with mutations of the virus. It is seriously much better to try to avoid catching the virus at all. The virus means you might be ok... or you might die, or you might have a lifetime of suffering that you wouldn't get with a vaccine.
  - ArkanExplorer 6y ago
    You can calculate the risk for yourself, based on data from the UK: https://qcovid.org/Calculation https://qcovid.org/Calculation eg. 30 year old healthy white male: 1 in 7,092 risk of hospitalisation, 1 in 250,000 risk of death. By contrast the risk of death from anything for a 30 year old male in the UK is 1 in 1,215: http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html http://www.bandolier.org.uk/booth/Risk/dyingage.html Even taking a healthy 80 year old male, the risk of death from COVID is 1 in 275, whereas the annual risk of death from anything is 1 in 15.

gotoeleven 6y ago

As we have learned over the last year, doing a cost benefit analysis on anything related to covid is the equivalent of drowning your grandmother in a bathtub.

mikem170 6y ago
And not just financial costs, but quality of life costs. One to two years of restrictions, quarantine, and/or lockdown is a sizeable fraction of everyone's lives. I feel bad for people in countries where people are even restricted from being outdoors, despite hearing again and again that outdoors is the safest place to be.

virgilp 6y ago

In EU at least plenty of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are still incoming, so there are actually alternatives to AZ. Do not forget that these vaccines are still very new, plus there's the possibility of a production issue with the AZ vaccine that affects only part of the production; I wouldn't say it's "politically-motivated" or a dumb idea to pause AZ vaccinations until one does a deeper investigation; I personally chose to avoid AZ due to a history of strokes in my family, I preferred to reserve a spot on the Moderna list. Better safe than sorry.

fasteddie31003 6y ago
It's the trolly problem. Pull the lever and kill one person. Don't pull the lever and kill 3 people. I'm a lever puller.
- hatch_q 6y ago
  But the real risk here is that the lever will get stuck. Even if 1 person dies from vaccine - it can create huge, long-lasting case against vaccination, causing more people to choose not to vaccinate and eventually killing a lot more people. There must be no doubts with vaccines, 100% trust in them is essential.
  - fasteddie31003 6y ago
    Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the great.
    - blub 6y ago
      We're not doing great at all at vaccine acceptance...
  - rleigh 6y ago
    > There must be no doubts with vaccines, 100% trust in them is essential. Completely unrealistic. Everything in life has associated risks, and vaccines do carry a (small) risk. It would be better to educate people about understanding and balancing relative risks rather than sensationalising a few outliers. The main fault here lies with the lack of proper rational discussion in the media.

isolli 6y ago

Agreed, and the same argument can be applied _against_ lockdowns (meaning measures such as mandatory stay-at-home orders that go beyond usual NPIs). I think it is slowly emerging that hard lockdowns have done more harm than good. There is no zero risk in life.

esperent 6y ago
There's a big difference here though - when it comes to a vaccine, we have hard stats to define the risk/reward ratio. I believe it's likely that lockdowns may cause some deaths, or possibly even lots of deaths. However, they certainly help prevent the spread of deadly disease too and hence prevent many deaths. We can probably get fairly definite numbers on how many deaths lockdown prevents in a large population. I don't think we can get similar numbers on how many they cause. My gut says they probably prevent a lot more than they cause, but I'd like to see any studies on this, if anyone has a link to share.
- isolli 6y ago
  Fair question. In a sense, the evidence for vaccines is upfront, while the evidence for lockdowns required the careful accumulation of data. I would cite for instance the paper by Ioannidis and co-authors [0]. "In summary, we fail to find strong evidence supporting a role for more restrictive NPIs in the control of COVID in early 2020. We do not question the role of all public health interventions, or of coordinated communications about the epidemic, but we fail to find an additional benefit of stay-at-home orders and business closures. The data cannot fully exclude the possibility of some benefits. However, even if they exist, these benefits may not match the numerous harms of these aggressive measures. More targeted public health interventions that more effectively reduce transmissions may be important for future epidemic control without the harms of highly restrictive measures." [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13484
  - 5cents 6y ago
    It may not affect your main point, but a caution: The paper has received critique [1], including a letter to the editor [1] https://pubpeer.com/publications/3D81CAC483C2021C00E27C8826DF71 https://pubpeer.com/publications/3D81CAC483C2021C00E27C8826D... [2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13518 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/eci.13518

xgb84j 6y ago

Yes, but those are different people that might be killed, which makes it an ethical dilemma. Depending on the type of adverse reaction, it might be safer for young people to not get vaccinated at all or with a different vaccine. (For example if the adverse reaction affects mostly young people, while COVID affects mostly older people.)

WanderPanda 6y ago
Thats why everyone should be free to chose to get vaccinated. It is not fair to transfer the disease risk from old/risk groups to (longterm) side-effect risks for young/healthy people
- lxgr 6y ago
  > Thats why everyone should be free to chose to get vaccinated. Isn't that the case? At least in my country, there is no obligation to take the vaccine, and even incentives (e.g. being able to attend public events sooner) are seen very critically.
  - ktybdr 6y ago
    There are definitely people with the view that they should be mandatory and I've personally started to encounter social pressure to get vaccinated, which I don't want to do, because I lead a low-contact hermit's life and the odds of dying from COVID which I probably won't catch if I maintain my lifestyle a few more months appears to be lower than the chance I'll die from a vaccine that I definitely get For my age cohort the chance of death from either is infinitesimal but because of Bayes it might make sense to continue to avoid both, but if I try to explain that to my peers they might think I'm a Trump supporter, and as everyone knows, Trump supporters should be shunned from polite society (especially since the "insurrection"), so I see this as a choice between social excommunication and a questionable injection I don't want Fun times
    - Retric 6y ago
      Assuming your odds of catching COVID is 1 in 1,000 that’s still a higher risk for any adult age group than the vaccines. I doubt your risk of catching covid is actually that low. More importantly it’s not just about avoiding death, a bad case of COVID is terrible even if you survive. On top of this you reduce the risk of spreading it to someone else.

hnedeotes 6y ago

> We don't not live in a 0 risk existence. ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah ah

colechristensen 6y ago

In the US, ~160,000 people over the age of 85 have died while 216 people under the age of 18 have died. Covid represents a proportion of deaths from all causes of 13.5% for 85+ and 0.58% under 18. The trend in between the age group extremes continues in an expected way. You can't make the same decisions about risks when you have one side so skewed by age. There is absolutely no guarantee that side effects from vaccination would be a preferable risk for younger populations or that vaccination side effects would have comparable age-related effects. Covid response isn't a religion, it's not "we have to do everything" or "we shouldn't do anything", responses need reason not gut reactions.

hef19898 6y ago
0.58% is an order of magnitude higher then 30 out of 17 million. Going by these numbers, AZ is still better than COVID. And I doubt any worse than other vaccines.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  That is an incorrect statistical comparison. It is 0.58% of all deaths being caused by covid. As in 994 out of 1000 people under 18 died in the same period from other things. Compared to people who are alive covid killed 0.000288% (or 1 in 350,000) under 18s. 30 in 17M is too few to have a reliable statistic, but that comes out to 1 in 567,000. If that holds, is age invariant, etc. etc. and ignoring the time-based nature of the covid deaths, taking that vaccine would represent a *50%* increase in death risk for under 18s, which is just absurdly high. (it doesn't matter that that 50% isn't exactly right, anything remotely close is an unacceptable risk) Statistics is hard.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Wouldn't taking the 1 in 567,000 risk eliminate the 1 in 350,000 risk. Vaccine risk and disease risks don't stack. But I could be mistaken, statistics is hard you know.
    - 6y ago

h3cate 6y ago

Why put people that are at low risk from covid at risk by giving them a vaccine?

string 6y ago
Because it reduces transmissibility.
- h3cate 6y ago
  Really? Do you want to link the evidence suggesting that?
  - contravariant 6y ago
    The current absence of smallpox.
  - rleigh 6y ago
    Really? We have over 200 years of vaccine use in public health programmes to control contagious disease. The most effective medical treatment humanity has ever devised. That has completely eliminated some of the most transmissible and debilitating diseases on the planet. Go and read a book on the subject, it's not like it's secret arcane knowledge. Reducing transmissibility is a basic (and bloody obvious) consequence of acquired immunity. If a vaccinated individual is reinfected, then compared to an unvaccinated individual the time to eliminate the virus is greatly reduced and the window of transmissibility is greatly reduced.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]