19 ms·

Astra Zeneca says it's less than 40 cases in 17 million. Are those numbers accurate? That seems like quite a small population affected.

by auiya 6y ago

rambojazz 6y ago
I think the argument for suspending the vaccine was that the number was still significantly higher than the expected value, despite being very low.
- cranekam 6y ago
  40 out of 17 million is 0.0002%. Surely 0.0002% of any cohort go on to develop blood clots? I'd certainly pick those odds over being unvaccinated.
  - marvin 6y ago
    If the risk turns out to be 1 in 50.000, which would be on the conservative side if the observations from Norway are correct, it's not a clear-cut question in a country with low incidence of Covid. Especially if other vaccines are available with a small delay. The British tool for calculating covid risk puts risk of death as 1 in 500.000 for a healthy 25-year old, and risk of hospital admission as 1 in 13.000. Must also add to this the public's willingness to vaccinate in the face of these numbers, both now and in the future. It's a shifting of risk from high-risk groups to low-risk groups.
    - BrianOnHN 6y ago
      > risk turns out to be 1 in 50.000 It's more like 1 in 500,000.
      - lyschoening 6y ago
        The numbers are three healthcare workers out of 120,000 vaccinated in Norway, with one death, so the risk is 1 in 40,000 from what we know. On top of that we can speculate that healthcare workers are more likely to seek treatment than the average vaccine recipient and they are healthy adults of average age.
        BrianOnHN 6y ago
        That's an odd sample to use unless you have some sort of agenda. The 40 out of 17MM is much more statistically significant.
        Daho0n 6y ago
        If you give a vaccine to 17 million people and 40 of those are children and all 40 children dies then should we just ignore that fact because the "40 out of 17MM is much more statistically significant"? Of course not.
        BrianOnHN 6y ago
        That's the epitome of a gross exaggeration.
        sydd 6y ago
        Everyone would seek treatment, the clotting has like a 40% fatality rate.
  - contravariant 6y ago
    If you read more closely you'll notice they're talking about a particular kind of thrombosis[1] which is accompanied by low platelet counts. This particular symptom is usually sign of a particular autoimmune response and has an incidence of about 4-5 per million people per year. [1]: <warning, contains images of heavy bruising> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrombotic_thrombocytopenic_purpura#Autoimmune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrombotic_thrombocytopenic_pu...
    - dekhn 6y ago
      so basically, base rate fallacy strikes agan.
marvin 6y ago
Time will tell, but I'd put my money on a lot of undiscovered cases in Europe and the UK. Vaccinations have mostly been in elderly people who are at high risk of health complications anyway, it's only recently that younger populations started receiving the vaccine. And Norway is among the most paranoid of these countries, with good health data and monitoring. Norway has also had at least three serious cases with 130.000 people vaccinated, so the incidence is certainly higher than 1 per 2.3 million. At this point, with a plausible mechanism of action being discovered, it's either that or a "bad batch". But this doesn't seem like the kind of problem that would likely be caused by contamination or bad ingredients, and there's been enough time by now that the batch numbers behind the cases will have been thoroughly checked. This will be a very tricky ethical consideration, with not only weighing different risks between different age groups, but also the public's trust in vaccines and the advice provided by health authorities. My money says that AZ will be pulled from countries with few Covid deaths and/or other vaccine options available in the near term. And some controversy in countries that do not meet these criteria.
- GavinMcG 6y ago
  > Norway has also had at least three serious cases with 130.000 people vaccinated, so the incidence is certainly higher than 1 per 2.3 million. That's not how numbers work. You can't look at California, for example, and conclude that because 63% of voters chose Biden, his national vote share is certainly higher than 52%.
  - marvin 6y ago
    It's 1 in 43.000 (Norway) versus 1 in 2.3 million (AZ numbers). That's a two orders of magnitude difference. While I can amend my statement to agree it's not certain that local factors and randomness haven't affected the outcome that much, it's a very suspicious observation.
    - GavinMcG 6y ago
      n=3 here. It's misplaced to be talking about orders of magnitude when a single case would drastically move the needle. If there were only one case in Norway (i.e. 1 in 130,000) it would still be orders of magnitude difference. But that's not meaningful.
runawaybottle 6y ago
Sort of the theme with Covid ultimately. I’m curious who will have the guts to re-examine the global shutdown as an exaggerated reaction as we go forward.
- afavour 6y ago
  40 cases of blood clots (and 0 confirmed deaths) in 17 million 538K confirmed deaths in 328 million (the US population) They really aren't comparable. EDIT: see replies below for details about deaths connected to the clots. I take that back. But my general point still stands, COVID is far, far more dangerous than the vaccine.
  - YinglingLight 6y ago
    It's financially lucrative for a hospital to have COVID deaths.
  - lemmonii 6y ago
    Did you read the article? The Norwegians claim that one of the health workers died.
    - afavour 6y ago
      I meant to write “confirmed deaths”, sorry. Updated my comment. “confirmed” might seem like nitpicking but it’s widely speculated that the actual death count for COVID is much higher than the confirmed number too.
  - bewaretheirs 6y ago
    7 cases in Germany, with 3 deaths. Patients were aged 20 to 50 years. https://www.pei.de/EN/newsroom/hp-news/2021/210315-pei-informs-temporary-suspension-vaccination-astra-zeneca.html https://www.pei.de/EN/newsroom/hp-news/2021/210315-pei-infor... https://www.pei.de/EN/service/faq/coronavirus/faq-coronavirus-node.html?cms_tabcounter=3 https://www.pei.de/EN/service/faq/coronavirus/faq-coronaviru...
jansan 6y ago
Keep in mind that Norway has only 1 to 2 COVID-19 deaths per day at the moment.
- 5cents 6y ago
  Indeed, and this far, "only" 8 women below 60 years have died from COVID-19 (in total) Source: https://www.fhi.no/sv/smittsomme-sykdommer/corona/dags--og-ukerapporter/dags--og-ukerapporter-om-koronavirus/#doedsfall https://www.fhi.no/sv/smittsomme-sykdommer/corona/dags--og-u...
  - jansan 6y ago
    Uh, I did not think that far. So if the vaccination is responsible for the deaths, it almost killed half the number of women below 50 that COVID has since March 2020. Fucking hell, and people outside Norway complain that the governmend is taking action? (EDIT: only one death, not three)
    - marvin 6y ago
      It's one death, not three, but I share the conclusion with the data that's currently available.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - 5cents 6y ago
      Update: two new deaths following vaccination, with a similar clinical picture, were just reported, they are now investigating if the vaccine is the likely cause Source (Norwegian): https://legemiddelverket.no/nyheter/legemiddelverket-har-mottatt-to-meldinger-om-dodsfall-hos-pasienter-pa-ous https://legemiddelverket.no/nyheter/legemiddelverket-har-mot...
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- 6y ago
bumbada 6y ago
That is a significant number for a medicament that is given to healthy people. If you had children and one of them died as a result of a vaccine, you would not say is a small population affected. There are other vaccines that can be used. I believe Oxford will license Sputnik and manufacture it.
- donohoe 6y ago
  Is it significant? The contraceptive pill has known risks of blood clotting that are significantly higher than that. If we are full of concern about this, maybe we should be focusing more on a drug that is used by millions of women year over year to improve its safety. https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/birth-control-methods-blood-clot-risk https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/birth-control-method...
  - Daho0n 6y ago
    No one is forced to or risk death by not taking contraceptives. Don't compare apples and lightbulbs just because they both might have the same shape. It's nonsense.
    - mchusma 6y ago
      No one anywhere to my knowledge is being forced to take any COVID vaccine.
- SilkRoadie 6y ago
  Vaccines have been prioritised for the old and vulnerable so that 17 million number will likely have been given to a large number of unhealthy people.
- skeeter2020 6y ago
  >> If you had children and one of them died as a result of a vaccine, you would not say is a small population affected. This is just a smart way of saying "Won't someone think of the children?" It's not genuine for you to speak of general-population statistical percentages in one sentence then evoke the emotional response from someone's specific loved-one in the next. >> There are other vaccines that can be used We need to get needles in arms NOW to save the most lives; any delay or alternative approach is actively killing people.
nabilhat 6y ago
It's still too early for the general public to draw conclusions from the data provided. Derek Lowe had some early observations on these numbers and their significance in regards to the critical missing data needed to make decisions: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/03/16/what-is-going-on-with-the-astrazeneca-oxford-vaccine https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/03/16/wh... > "...they say that is indeed “much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of this size“. It also appears to be similar to what’s been seen with the other coronavirus vaccines..." Until we know the methods and expectations behind numbers provided, naively taking them at face value suggests that this vaccine reduces the risk of these blood clots in the general pre-covid population. In the absence of statistically robust information about these alerts, we're stuck assuming that the experts know what they're doing until the detailed work is available and recognizing that (as Derek pointed out months ago) public attention is going to find focus on the inevitable mortality and illness rates without accomodating that people also die and have health issues for other reasons. Watch a random selection of 17 million people for a month, a five digit number of them will die. More if they're predominantly on the elder end of the scale...
- mchusma 6y ago
  Derek did a good job on this issue, both warning it would happen before and re-emphasizing that it's most likely statistical anomaly. Even if the blood clots were a result of the AZ vaccine, it would still make more sense for most people to take the vaccine (I would), so a ban is entirely unjustified. Governments banning their citizens from taking Astrazeneca should use accurate language "it's banned" instead of the language "pause rollout". Taking a COVID vaccine is a choice individuals make and governments have denied them during a pandemic.
  - petre 6y ago
    I guess I'll take my 2.35e-6 chance (40 in 17M) to get blood clots over a 1.6e-3 chance to contact covid (4‰ infection rate) and die from it (4% mortality rate).
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
dekhn 6y ago
most news reporting about adverse health events makes the problems sound far more severe and significant than they really are.
- auiya 6y ago
  And most brands with a product to sell make the problems seem far less severe and significant than they really are, which is why we need to question both.

Astra Zeneca says it's less than 40 cases in 17 million. Are those numbers accurate? That seems like quite a small population affected.

by auiya 6y ago

Astra Zeneca says it's less than 40 cases in 17 million. Are those numbers accurate? That seems like quite a small population affected.

rambojazz 6y ago

I think the argument for suspending the vaccine was that the number was still significantly higher than the expected value, despite being very low.

cranekam 6y ago
40 out of 17 million is 0.0002%. Surely 0.0002% of any cohort go on to develop blood clots? I'd certainly pick those odds over being unvaccinated.
- marvin 6y ago
  If the risk turns out to be 1 in 50.000, which would be on the conservative side if the observations from Norway are correct, it's not a clear-cut question in a country with low incidence of Covid. Especially if other vaccines are available with a small delay. The British tool for calculating covid risk puts risk of death as 1 in 500.000 for a healthy 25-year old, and risk of hospital admission as 1 in 13.000. Must also add to this the public's willingness to vaccinate in the face of these numbers, both now and in the future. It's a shifting of risk from high-risk groups to low-risk groups.
  - BrianOnHN 6y ago
    > risk turns out to be 1 in 50.000 It's more like 1 in 500,000.
    - lyschoening 6y ago
      The numbers are three healthcare workers out of 120,000 vaccinated in Norway, with one death, so the risk is 1 in 40,000 from what we know. On top of that we can speculate that healthcare workers are more likely to seek treatment than the average vaccine recipient and they are healthy adults of average age.
      - BrianOnHN 6y ago
        That's an odd sample to use unless you have some sort of agenda. The 40 out of 17MM is much more statistically significant.
        Daho0n 6y ago
        If you give a vaccine to 17 million people and 40 of those are children and all 40 children dies then should we just ignore that fact because the "40 out of 17MM is much more statistically significant"? Of course not.
        BrianOnHN 6y ago
        That's the epitome of a gross exaggeration.
      - sydd 6y ago
        Everyone would seek treatment, the clotting has like a 40% fatality rate.
- contravariant 6y ago
  If you read more closely you'll notice they're talking about a particular kind of thrombosis[1] which is accompanied by low platelet counts. This particular symptom is usually sign of a particular autoimmune response and has an incidence of about 4-5 per million people per year. [1]: <warning, contains images of heavy bruising> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrombotic_thrombocytopenic_purpura#Autoimmune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thrombotic_thrombocytopenic_pu...
  - dekhn 6y ago
    so basically, base rate fallacy strikes agan.

marvin 6y ago

Time will tell, but I'd put my money on a lot of undiscovered cases in Europe and the UK. Vaccinations have mostly been in elderly people who are at high risk of health complications anyway, it's only recently that younger populations started receiving the vaccine. And Norway is among the most paranoid of these countries, with good health data and monitoring. Norway has also had at least three serious cases with 130.000 people vaccinated, so the incidence is certainly higher than 1 per 2.3 million. At this point, with a plausible mechanism of action being discovered, it's either that or a "bad batch". But this doesn't seem like the kind of problem that would likely be caused by contamination or bad ingredients, and there's been enough time by now that the batch numbers behind the cases will have been thoroughly checked. This will be a very tricky ethical consideration, with not only weighing different risks between different age groups, but also the public's trust in vaccines and the advice provided by health authorities. My money says that AZ will be pulled from countries with few Covid deaths and/or other vaccine options available in the near term. And some controversy in countries that do not meet these criteria.

GavinMcG 6y ago
> Norway has also had at least three serious cases with 130.000 people vaccinated, so the incidence is certainly higher than 1 per 2.3 million. That's not how numbers work. You can't look at California, for example, and conclude that because 63% of voters chose Biden, his national vote share is certainly higher than 52%.
- marvin 6y ago
  It's 1 in 43.000 (Norway) versus 1 in 2.3 million (AZ numbers). That's a two orders of magnitude difference. While I can amend my statement to agree it's not certain that local factors and randomness haven't affected the outcome that much, it's a very suspicious observation.
  - GavinMcG 6y ago
    n=3 here. It's misplaced to be talking about orders of magnitude when a single case would drastically move the needle. If there were only one case in Norway (i.e. 1 in 130,000) it would still be orders of magnitude difference. But that's not meaningful.

runawaybottle 6y ago

Sort of the theme with Covid ultimately. I’m curious who will have the guts to re-examine the global shutdown as an exaggerated reaction as we go forward.

afavour 6y ago
40 cases of blood clots (and 0 confirmed deaths) in 17 million 538K confirmed deaths in 328 million (the US population) They really aren't comparable. EDIT: see replies below for details about deaths connected to the clots. I take that back. But my general point still stands, COVID is far, far more dangerous than the vaccine.
- YinglingLight 6y ago
  It's financially lucrative for a hospital to have COVID deaths.
- lemmonii 6y ago
  Did you read the article? The Norwegians claim that one of the health workers died.
  - afavour 6y ago
    I meant to write “confirmed deaths”, sorry. Updated my comment. “confirmed” might seem like nitpicking but it’s widely speculated that the actual death count for COVID is much higher than the confirmed number too.
- bewaretheirs 6y ago
  7 cases in Germany, with 3 deaths. Patients were aged 20 to 50 years. https://www.pei.de/EN/newsroom/hp-news/2021/210315-pei-informs-temporary-suspension-vaccination-astra-zeneca.html https://www.pei.de/EN/newsroom/hp-news/2021/210315-pei-infor... https://www.pei.de/EN/service/faq/coronavirus/faq-coronavirus-node.html?cms_tabcounter=3 https://www.pei.de/EN/service/faq/coronavirus/faq-coronaviru...

jansan 6y ago

Keep in mind that Norway has only 1 to 2 COVID-19 deaths per day at the moment.

5cents 6y ago
Indeed, and this far, "only" 8 women below 60 years have died from COVID-19 (in total) Source: https://www.fhi.no/sv/smittsomme-sykdommer/corona/dags--og-ukerapporter/dags--og-ukerapporter-om-koronavirus/#doedsfall https://www.fhi.no/sv/smittsomme-sykdommer/corona/dags--og-u...
- jansan 6y ago
  Uh, I did not think that far. So if the vaccination is responsible for the deaths, it almost killed half the number of women below 50 that COVID has since March 2020. Fucking hell, and people outside Norway complain that the governmend is taking action? (EDIT: only one death, not three)
  - marvin 6y ago
    It's one death, not three, but I share the conclusion with the data that's currently available.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - 5cents 6y ago
    Update: two new deaths following vaccination, with a similar clinical picture, were just reported, they are now investigating if the vaccine is the likely cause Source (Norwegian): https://legemiddelverket.no/nyheter/legemiddelverket-har-mottatt-to-meldinger-om-dodsfall-hos-pasienter-pa-ous https://legemiddelverket.no/nyheter/legemiddelverket-har-mot...
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
6y ago

bumbada 6y ago

That is a significant number for a medicament that is given to healthy people. If you had children and one of them died as a result of a vaccine, you would not say is a small population affected. There are other vaccines that can be used. I believe Oxford will license Sputnik and manufacture it.

donohoe 6y ago
Is it significant? The contraceptive pill has known risks of blood clotting that are significantly higher than that. If we are full of concern about this, maybe we should be focusing more on a drug that is used by millions of women year over year to improve its safety. https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/birth-control-methods-blood-clot-risk https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/birth-control-method...
- Daho0n 6y ago
  No one is forced to or risk death by not taking contraceptives. Don't compare apples and lightbulbs just because they both might have the same shape. It's nonsense.
  - mchusma 6y ago
    No one anywhere to my knowledge is being forced to take any COVID vaccine.
SilkRoadie 6y ago
Vaccines have been prioritised for the old and vulnerable so that 17 million number will likely have been given to a large number of unhealthy people.
skeeter2020 6y ago
>> If you had children and one of them died as a result of a vaccine, you would not say is a small population affected. This is just a smart way of saying "Won't someone think of the children?" It's not genuine for you to speak of general-population statistical percentages in one sentence then evoke the emotional response from someone's specific loved-one in the next. >> There are other vaccines that can be used We need to get needles in arms NOW to save the most lives; any delay or alternative approach is actively killing people.

nabilhat 6y ago

It's still too early for the general public to draw conclusions from the data provided. Derek Lowe had some early observations on these numbers and their significance in regards to the critical missing data needed to make decisions: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/03/16/what-is-going-on-with-the-astrazeneca-oxford-vaccine https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/03/16/wh... > "...they say that is indeed “much lower than would be expected to occur naturally in a general population of this size“. It also appears to be similar to what’s been seen with the other coronavirus vaccines..." Until we know the methods and expectations behind numbers provided, naively taking them at face value suggests that this vaccine reduces the risk of these blood clots in the general pre-covid population. In the absence of statistically robust information about these alerts, we're stuck assuming that the experts know what they're doing until the detailed work is available and recognizing that (as Derek pointed out months ago) public attention is going to find focus on the inevitable mortality and illness rates without accomodating that people also die and have health issues for other reasons. Watch a random selection of 17 million people for a month, a five digit number of them will die. More if they're predominantly on the elder end of the scale...

mchusma 6y ago
Derek did a good job on this issue, both warning it would happen before and re-emphasizing that it's most likely statistical anomaly. Even if the blood clots were a result of the AZ vaccine, it would still make more sense for most people to take the vaccine (I would), so a ban is entirely unjustified. Governments banning their citizens from taking Astrazeneca should use accurate language "it's banned" instead of the language "pause rollout". Taking a COVID vaccine is a choice individuals make and governments have denied them during a pandemic.
- petre 6y ago
  I guess I'll take my 2.35e-6 chance (40 in 17M) to get blood clots over a 1.6e-3 chance to contact covid (4‰ infection rate) and die from it (4% mortality rate).
- kwhitefoot 6y ago

dekhn 6y ago

most news reporting about adverse health events makes the problems sound far more severe and significant than they really are.

auiya 6y ago
And most brands with a product to sell make the problems seem far less severe and significant than they really are, which is why we need to question both.