7 ms·

British regulator cites 41 more blood clot reports following AstraZeneca shots

36 points by underscore_ku 5y ago

calltrak 5y ago
Two rats where chatting about weather to take the coivid injections or not one rat says to the other.... hell I will just show you the cartoon strip. It's easier :) https://picc.io/p/tq2sFHU.png https://picc.io/p/tq2sFHU.png
scotty79 5y ago
How many would you expect in same number of people that wouldn't have taken the vaccine?
- lsllc 5y ago
  According to this BBC News article, it's 4 per 1M: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55302595 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55302595 Quote: "The MHRA said about four people in a million would normally be expected to develop this particular kind of blood clot - though the fact they are so rare makes the usual rate hard to estimate."
  - scotty79 5y ago
    Since 22 million people got at least one dose of the vaccine in UK you'd expect 88 of them to get this issue without taking a vaccine. 41 after vaccine doesn't sound alarming at all.
    - CarelessExpert 5y ago
      That's because it's not. First off, the statistical chance of developing a clot is already pretty damn low. The odds of that being a fatal clot are even lower than that, as now that the side-effect is understood and you can monitor for symptoms, it's typically a very treatable condition. In the end I guarantee you that, thanks to the poor government response and irresponsible reporting around this issue, more people will die from Covid as a consequence of people delaying or refusing vaccination than will die from this side effect.
Thev00d00 5y ago
So that's what 0.0000095%? I'll take 5 nines success chance.
- jozvolskyef 5y ago
  From what David Spiegelhalter said earlier it's about 1 in 250k for the under-30s. That's 0.0004%. The problem is that if you control for the right parameters the expected outcome is worse, possibly by multiple orders of magnitude, than that of being infected with covid.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    What do you mean by that? Control in what way?
    - ggm 5y ago
      It's an odd way of saying if you pre screen you can say which people probably shouldn't get this vaccine.
  - data_acquired 5y ago
    This pre-print (edit : now published apparently!) argued that the likelihood of clots from Covid was still higher than AZ vaccines https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.19.21253980v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.19.21253980v.... Fauci agreed with their conclusions (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-blood-clots-risk-disease/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-blood-clots-risk-...) but disagreed with the aspects of this study that looked at mRNA vaccines and blood clots (but hasn't given reasons why he disagrees with this aspect).
    - jozvolskyef 5y ago
      You seem to have linked a different article.
      - 5y ago
nicbou 5y ago
I have a genuine question about this. If we discover issues within 60 days of getting the vaccine, what does it mean for the next 70 years of my life? I understand that the odds of getting thrombosis are very low, but what about the chances of other serious issues cropping up later? Is this a reasonable concern?
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  That's what long-term studies are for, but we've bypassed those for this vaccine. Just as a layman though, my instinct would be that something like a vaccine would have pretty short-lived side-effects. It's a single dose (or maybe two, depending) and it doesn't persist in the body for very long. Most drugs with bad long-term effects are ones that are taken on an ongoing basis.
  - randomluck040 5y ago
    I think the issue wouldn’t be that the vaccine is in the body for a long time to damage something but that it damages something in a way in a short time frame that keeps damaging other things or starts going wrong.
  - astrognomy 5y ago
    Hi throwawayboise, Boise resident and native myself for the record, the idea these bypassed needed studies is a complete fabrication. Please stop harming both of the communities we seem to share by spreading this nonsense.
    - curryst 5y ago
      It's not a fabrication. These vaccines haven't even existed for a year; there is no possible way to do a long term study in under a year. Whether you feel like a long term study is needed is certainly up for debate, but none have actually been done.
      - feu 5y ago
carpedimebagjoe 5y ago
Would the mortality rate of prescribing warfarin prophylactically to middle-aged women for 3.5 weeks be less than 4 / million? What's the mortality rate of seasonal flu and MMRV vaccines?
Sunspark 5y ago
I have seen reports that Pfizer and Moderna have had blood clot numbers too. I'm getting pretty tired of all the anti-AZ hysteria. I got the 1st shot of it and will get the second. Put it this way, if you get actual covid, your risk of getting a blood clot drops to something like out of 1,000. That's way better odds than a million. So logically right there, the vaccine is a great idea. Secondly, I haven't been convinced that some of this negative press isn't intentional. AZ is non-profit, Pfizer and the others are for-profit. Who benefits from negative AZ stories?
- varispeed 5y ago
  I don't understand that any question about a potential corruption motive is treated as a taboo. Corruption is more rife than ever in the current politics and nothing is being done about it. Why people downvote genuine worry that such thing might be happening is beyond me. Corruption is what destroys societies and yet people look away hoping if they don't see it then it is not happening.
  - Sunspark 5y ago
    I don't consider blood clots as genuine worry. The risk of getting a blood clot from covid is much higher. The risk of suffering a serious adverse medical event from covid is much higher. There is a much higher risk/reward ratio for public health to have vaccines proceed than to not. The narrative of AZ being scary is fueling vaccine hesitancy and contributing to vaccine shopping.
    - this_user 5y ago
      > I don't consider blood clots as genuine worry. The risk of getting a blood clot from covid is much higher. The risk of suffering a serious adverse medical event from covid is much higher. This is simply not true. COVID does not have a higher risk of inducing this specific kind of blood clots, the risk of death from which seems to be around 20% based on the available data. Furthermore, the risk of suffering such an event from the AZN vaccine seems to increase with lower age while the risk of serious medical events from COVID appear to rise exponential with age, i.e. the risk to a young person is almost negligible. Obviously, there must exist an equilibrium at which the risk of taking this vaccine equals the risk from COVID. But given that other vaccines are available that a) have higher efficacy, and b) have a substantially lower risk of causing blood clots than the AZN vaccine, we need to assume that the age of equilibrium lies relatively high. This means that if you life in a country with access to mRNA vaccines in the foreseeable future, and if you are healthy and below the age bracket of 60-70 where the risk of serious complications from COVID starts ramping up substantially, you are better off waiting if only the AZN vaccine is available. The real problem isn't people pointing out these issues with the AZN vaccine, but people like you who insist that they are perfectly safe even though that is objectively untrue, and better alternatives exist.
geff82 5y ago
We've heard now of two deaths after AZ shots in our vincinity (a pharmacist and a kindergarten employee), plus we heard from a doctor in Scotland who said he himself had two dead patients after AZ shots while the hospital he worked at had dozens. We haven't heard anything noteworthy about other vaccines so far (that includes Russian and Chinese vaccines).
- olyjohn 5y ago
  I just heard about the Russian ones... with the cold virus in it that may be able to replicate.
- TaupeRanger 5y ago
  Sounds like conspiratorial nonsense not confirmed by any actual data whatsoever.
Mvandenbergh 5y ago
It seems that as the number of vaccines administers goes up, the rate of CSVT is converging on slightly more frequent than 1/100k. They have now also confirmed that there is an age effect which they found in the previous data release as well but which the EMA, with a smaller sample size at the time, had not been able to determine to their satisfaction previously. The JCVI now has the challenging task of making a recommendation for people in their 30s without occupational or health reasons for priority, whose turn it will be over the coming weeks to start receiving vaccines. (People from 18-30 have already been recommended a different vaccine "if available", there is probably just barely enough Moderna on order for Q2 to give most of them that). Making that decision is a very difficult one because it depends on a lot of context. You're not just deciding between giving the vaccine and not ever vaccinating, you first have to decide what the counterfactual scenario is where you don't give a 35 year old an AZ dose next week. This on: a) The incidence rate for each demographic of CSVT-type clotting from the vaccine[s]. b) The expected distribution of clinical outcomes from those events, making reasonable assumptions about likelihood of early detection and outcomes with treatment for heparin induced thrombosis. Those two give you the clinical risk of the vaccine. Then you compare those with the clinical benefit from: 1) The relative likelihood of infection for a person, given their demographics, personal exposure profile etc. 2) The absolute likelihood of infection in the country / region in question based on assumptions about the future of the pandemic 3) The expected distribution of clinical outcomes from infection given the person's characteristics (2) is important because you're comparing a one-time risk of side-effects with a time-related risk of infection. Clearly, the same person in Delhi or New Zealand is not really making the same trade-off even if in the abstract, the side-effects and IFR are the same. You also need the counterfactual: If you decide not to give an ad vectored vaccine, you are not deciding never to vaccinate, you are deciding that this person will get a different vaccine, probably later. How much later depends on the location. If you're in the US, you've got Moderna and Pfizer/Biontech coming out of your ears so it might only delay any individual vaccination by a few weeks. If you're a healthy 25 year old who can work from home, the risk trade-off of having to wait an extra 6 days is very different than that same person if they have to wait another 6 months. As a result, different countries, looking at the same data will rationally make different decisions because their counterfactuals are different. The US has lots of mRNA vaccines so will choose one thing, the EU has been badly hit by the failure of Sanofi/GSK to deliver a working vaccine, by AstraZeneca scaling problems, and by J&J coming along later than anticipated but has quite a lot Pfizer production capacity, the UK has used up its Pfizer stocks and will now only use it for second shots. CureVac and Novavax may be able to supply some doses at some point but aren't in the picture yet. Several European countries are negotiating to get Sputnik but that is also ad vectored so may have the same problem (and according to reports from Anvisa in Brazil appears to have replication competent adenovirus in it which is definitely not the intention). That changes the risk calculation because it changes the time that people will remain unvaccinated in the counterfactual where ad vectored vaccines are not used for their age group. Of course, you also have to consider the risks from the other vaccines. Risks from the mRNA vaccines appear very low but J&J seems to have the same clotting issue though maybe at a lower frequency. So if you're delaying someone's vaccine in order to get them J&J, you have to calculate the (seems to be lower) CSVT rate in the counterfactual as well. All of this is before the complicated public health element of keeping messages for the public simple and the issues caused by changing that message frequently and the long-term need to ensure that public trust in vaccine programmes remains deserved by the honesty with which they are conducted. It's pretty clear that in the UK where there is just about enough AZ to slowly vaccinate the 30-40s and enough Moderna for the 18-30s (but not any more than that), the public health professionals and immunologists on the JCVI are agonising over the right thing to do. I would be too, even though for myself I have happily received AZ in my mid 30s but it must be an awesome and terrible weight to make a recommendation like that for other people, knowing that they trust you to make the right decision.
antattack 5y ago
"MHRA shows that rare clots from the vaccine occur at a rate of 0.8 per 100,000 for the 30-to-39 age band" "over-55 population, [] the relative risk of clots is 0.4 per 100,000" [1] [1]https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-28/britain-and-eu-may-both-be-wrong-on-astra-s-vaccine https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-28/britai...

36 points by underscore_ku 5y ago

Two rats where chatting about weather to take the coivid injections or not one rat says to the other.... hell I will just show you the cartoon strip. It's easier :) https://picc.io/p/tq2sFHU.png https://picc.io/p/tq2sFHU.png

scotty79 5y ago

How many would you expect in same number of people that wouldn't have taken the vaccine?

lsllc 5y ago
According to this BBC News article, it's 4 per 1M: https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55302595 https://www.bbc.com/news/health-55302595 Quote: "The MHRA said about four people in a million would normally be expected to develop this particular kind of blood clot - though the fact they are so rare makes the usual rate hard to estimate."
- scotty79 5y ago
  Since 22 million people got at least one dose of the vaccine in UK you'd expect 88 of them to get this issue without taking a vaccine. 41 after vaccine doesn't sound alarming at all.
  - CarelessExpert 5y ago
    That's because it's not. First off, the statistical chance of developing a clot is already pretty damn low. The odds of that being a fatal clot are even lower than that, as now that the side-effect is understood and you can monitor for symptoms, it's typically a very treatable condition. In the end I guarantee you that, thanks to the poor government response and irresponsible reporting around this issue, more people will die from Covid as a consequence of people delaying or refusing vaccination than will die from this side effect.

Thev00d00 5y ago

So that's what 0.0000095%? I'll take 5 nines success chance.

jozvolskyef 5y ago
From what David Spiegelhalter said earlier it's about 1 in 250k for the under-30s. That's 0.0004%. The problem is that if you control for the right parameters the expected outcome is worse, possibly by multiple orders of magnitude, than that of being infected with covid.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  What do you mean by that? Control in what way?
  - ggm 5y ago
    It's an odd way of saying if you pre screen you can say which people probably shouldn't get this vaccine.
- data_acquired 5y ago
  This pre-print (edit : now published apparently!) argued that the likelihood of clots from Covid was still higher than AZ vaccines https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.19.21253980v1.full https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.03.19.21253980v.... Fauci agreed with their conclusions (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-blood-clots-risk-disease/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-vaccine-blood-clots-risk-...) but disagreed with the aspects of this study that looked at mRNA vaccines and blood clots (but hasn't given reasons why he disagrees with this aspect).
  - jozvolskyef 5y ago
    You seem to have linked a different article.
    - 5y ago

nicbou 5y ago

I have a genuine question about this. If we discover issues within 60 days of getting the vaccine, what does it mean for the next 70 years of my life? I understand that the odds of getting thrombosis are very low, but what about the chances of other serious issues cropping up later? Is this a reasonable concern?

throwawayboise 5y ago
That's what long-term studies are for, but we've bypassed those for this vaccine. Just as a layman though, my instinct would be that something like a vaccine would have pretty short-lived side-effects. It's a single dose (or maybe two, depending) and it doesn't persist in the body for very long. Most drugs with bad long-term effects are ones that are taken on an ongoing basis.
- randomluck040 5y ago
  I think the issue wouldn’t be that the vaccine is in the body for a long time to damage something but that it damages something in a way in a short time frame that keeps damaging other things or starts going wrong.
- astrognomy 5y ago
  Hi throwawayboise, Boise resident and native myself for the record, the idea these bypassed needed studies is a complete fabrication. Please stop harming both of the communities we seem to share by spreading this nonsense.
  - curryst 5y ago
    It's not a fabrication. These vaccines haven't even existed for a year; there is no possible way to do a long term study in under a year. Whether you feel like a long term study is needed is certainly up for debate, but none have actually been done.
    - feu 5y ago

carpedimebagjoe 5y ago

Would the mortality rate of prescribing warfarin prophylactically to middle-aged women for 3.5 weeks be less than 4 / million? What's the mortality rate of seasonal flu and MMRV vaccines?

Sunspark 5y ago

I have seen reports that Pfizer and Moderna have had blood clot numbers too. I'm getting pretty tired of all the anti-AZ hysteria. I got the 1st shot of it and will get the second. Put it this way, if you get actual covid, your risk of getting a blood clot drops to something like out of 1,000. That's way better odds than a million. So logically right there, the vaccine is a great idea. Secondly, I haven't been convinced that some of this negative press isn't intentional. AZ is non-profit, Pfizer and the others are for-profit. Who benefits from negative AZ stories?

varispeed 5y ago
I don't understand that any question about a potential corruption motive is treated as a taboo. Corruption is more rife than ever in the current politics and nothing is being done about it. Why people downvote genuine worry that such thing might be happening is beyond me. Corruption is what destroys societies and yet people look away hoping if they don't see it then it is not happening.
- Sunspark 5y ago
  I don't consider blood clots as genuine worry. The risk of getting a blood clot from covid is much higher. The risk of suffering a serious adverse medical event from covid is much higher. There is a much higher risk/reward ratio for public health to have vaccines proceed than to not. The narrative of AZ being scary is fueling vaccine hesitancy and contributing to vaccine shopping.
  - this_user 5y ago
    > I don't consider blood clots as genuine worry. The risk of getting a blood clot from covid is much higher. The risk of suffering a serious adverse medical event from covid is much higher. This is simply not true. COVID does not have a higher risk of inducing this specific kind of blood clots, the risk of death from which seems to be around 20% based on the available data. Furthermore, the risk of suffering such an event from the AZN vaccine seems to increase with lower age while the risk of serious medical events from COVID appear to rise exponential with age, i.e. the risk to a young person is almost negligible. Obviously, there must exist an equilibrium at which the risk of taking this vaccine equals the risk from COVID. But given that other vaccines are available that a) have higher efficacy, and b) have a substantially lower risk of causing blood clots than the AZN vaccine, we need to assume that the age of equilibrium lies relatively high. This means that if you life in a country with access to mRNA vaccines in the foreseeable future, and if you are healthy and below the age bracket of 60-70 where the risk of serious complications from COVID starts ramping up substantially, you are better off waiting if only the AZN vaccine is available. The real problem isn't people pointing out these issues with the AZN vaccine, but people like you who insist that they are perfectly safe even though that is objectively untrue, and better alternatives exist.

geff82 5y ago

We've heard now of two deaths after AZ shots in our vincinity (a pharmacist and a kindergarten employee), plus we heard from a doctor in Scotland who said he himself had two dead patients after AZ shots while the hospital he worked at had dozens. We haven't heard anything noteworthy about other vaccines so far (that includes Russian and Chinese vaccines).

olyjohn 5y ago
I just heard about the Russian ones... with the cold virus in it that may be able to replicate.
TaupeRanger 5y ago
Sounds like conspiratorial nonsense not confirmed by any actual data whatsoever.

Mvandenbergh 5y ago

It seems that as the number of vaccines administers goes up, the rate of CSVT is converging on slightly more frequent than 1/100k. They have now also confirmed that there is an age effect which they found in the previous data release as well but which the EMA, with a smaller sample size at the time, had not been able to determine to their satisfaction previously. The JCVI now has the challenging task of making a recommendation for people in their 30s without occupational or health reasons for priority, whose turn it will be over the coming weeks to start receiving vaccines. (People from 18-30 have already been recommended a different vaccine "if available", there is probably just barely enough Moderna on order for Q2 to give most of them that). Making that decision is a very difficult one because it depends on a lot of context. You're not just deciding between giving the vaccine and not ever vaccinating, you first have to decide what the counterfactual scenario is where you don't give a 35 year old an AZ dose next week. This on: a) The incidence rate for each demographic of CSVT-type clotting from the vaccine[s]. b) The expected distribution of clinical outcomes from those events, making reasonable assumptions about likelihood of early detection and outcomes with treatment for heparin induced thrombosis. Those two give you the clinical risk of the vaccine. Then you compare those with the clinical benefit from: 1) The relative likelihood of infection for a person, given their demographics, personal exposure profile etc. 2) The absolute likelihood of infection in the country / region in question based on assumptions about the future of the pandemic 3) The expected distribution of clinical outcomes from infection given the person's characteristics (2) is important because you're comparing a one-time risk of side-effects with a time-related risk of infection. Clearly, the same person in Delhi or New Zealand is not really making the same trade-off even if in the abstract, the side-effects and IFR are the same. You also need the counterfactual: If you decide not to give an ad vectored vaccine, you are not deciding never to vaccinate, you are deciding that this person will get a different vaccine, probably later. How much later depends on the location. If you're in the US, you've got Moderna and Pfizer/Biontech coming out of your ears so it might only delay any individual vaccination by a few weeks. If you're a healthy 25 year old who can work from home, the risk trade-off of having to wait an extra 6 days is very different than that same person if they have to wait another 6 months. As a result, different countries, looking at the same data will rationally make different decisions because their counterfactuals are different. The US has lots of mRNA vaccines so will choose one thing, the EU has been badly hit by the failure of Sanofi/GSK to deliver a working vaccine, by AstraZeneca scaling problems, and by J&J coming along later than anticipated but has quite a lot Pfizer production capacity, the UK has used up its Pfizer stocks and will now only use it for second shots. CureVac and Novavax may be able to supply some doses at some point but aren't in the picture yet. Several European countries are negotiating to get Sputnik but that is also ad vectored so may have the same problem (and according to reports from Anvisa in Brazil appears to have replication competent adenovirus in it which is definitely not the intention). That changes the risk calculation because it changes the time that people will remain unvaccinated in the counterfactual where ad vectored vaccines are not used for their age group. Of course, you also have to consider the risks from the other vaccines. Risks from the mRNA vaccines appear very low but J&J seems to have the same clotting issue though maybe at a lower frequency. So if you're delaying someone's vaccine in order to get them J&J, you have to calculate the (seems to be lower) CSVT rate in the counterfactual as well. All of this is before the complicated public health element of keeping messages for the public simple and the issues caused by changing that message frequently and the long-term need to ensure that public trust in vaccine programmes remains deserved by the honesty with which they are conducted. It's pretty clear that in the UK where there is just about enough AZ to slowly vaccinate the 30-40s and enough Moderna for the 18-30s (but not any more than that), the public health professionals and immunologists on the JCVI are agonising over the right thing to do. I would be too, even though for myself I have happily received AZ in my mid 30s but it must be an awesome and terrible weight to make a recommendation like that for other people, knowing that they trust you to make the right decision.

antattack 5y ago

"MHRA shows that rare clots from the vaccine occur at a rate of 0.8 per 100,000 for the 30-to-39 age band" "over-55 population, [] the relative risk of clots is 0.4 per 100,000" [1] [1]https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-28/britain-and-eu-may-both-be-wrong-on-astra-s-vaccine https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-28/britai...