It will depend on the rhetoric how well rhe 2 sides will get on in the future. But even competitors can get on if there is mutual respect for the other’s opinions and cultures.
gallois wrote:
It will depend on the rhetoric how well rhe 2 sides will get on in the future. But even competitors can get on if there is mutual respect for the other’s opinions and cultures.
I completely agree with you.
Peter wrote:
None of this makes scientific sense.
I totally disagree – it absolutely makes scientific sense and is even, from a scientific POV the only rational reaction!
It is always a serious incident when side effects of a drug show up in real life that have not been identified during trials.
First of all one needs to find out, how frequent they really are. Even if we only hear few cases we need to very closely check if it’s not many more – one of the downsides of undocumented side effects is, that individual physicians often can not draw the line and do not report an incident as side effect?
In this case it fortunately turned out that there are not so many cases unknown so far – but it could have been different.
Then we have to do what is normally done for each side effect during trials: Understand the cases! Is it truly random? Is it an interaction (with another drug, food, environmental factor)? Does it affect a certain population (with a much higher %age than in general population)?
And finally not to forget: We need to check very carefully if the newly discovered side effects are not only the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem. Cerebral blood clots are comparatively easy to identify in adults (and even there we sometimes discover them too late to act). But just imagine the vaccine would cause clots in unborn children? We often do not find out before they were born. So it would not be impossible based on the new insights on the AZ vaccine that it causes significant yet undiscovered harm in unborns. (Btw. at least in Germany we had exactly that situation with Thalidomit (Contergan) in the early 60ies).
Luckily by now we have good scientific evidence that all of that does not happen in the case of the AZ vaccine – but just we know better in hindsight does not at all mean that it was unscientific to take action before we knew.
Why didn’t the UK see this, across 11M+ people? They did include young women in the NHS staff, and others e.g. fire crew and police who got done “quietly” back in January.
Thalidomide is not a good comparison because it was intended for pregnant women but wasn’t tested on them.
Malibuflyer wrote:
It is always a serious incident when side effects of a drug show up in real life that have not been identified during trials.
Surely the point is that it is almost certainly NOT a side-effect, but rather a coincidence.
The people who thought the MMR jab caused autism used the same faulty logic of declaring that one must be related to the other simply because of conincidental timing.
One has to wonder what sort of messaging is going out. Even after everything that’s happened, people are still saying these clots are a side-effects of the AZ jab?
Graham wrote:
Surely the point is that it is almost certainly NOT a side-effect, but rather a coincidence.
This is not correct – it has been shown even in earlier in this thread that the reported case numbers are outside of the 3s confidence interval of this specific type of clots in general population and even more so in the specific sub population of middle aged women.
By now everyone agrees that it is a side effect but still a rare one – the article Peter quoted is a good one on the facts.
Plus as said before even if we would know by now that the numbers are not outside normal spread, it would still have been the right decision to check first.
Peter wrote:
Why didn’t the UK see this, across 11M+ people? They did include young women in the NHS staff, and others e.g. fire crew and police who got done “quietly” back in January.
That’s actually a good question – and one of the reasons why it actually was a good idea to interrupt vaccinations. Did UK have similar cases but failed to make the link to vaccination? Are UK women in this age group take different drugs, drink different drinks, do different things, …, or have different genomes than women in continental Europe?
From the BBC, here
In the UK, five cases of cerebral sinus vein thrombosis (CSVT), among 11 million people who have received the vaccine, occurred in men aged between 19 and 59. One of these was fatal.
I don’t believe it was reported before now. Just to be clear, they are not asserting a vaccine link.
Malibuflyer wrote:
This is not correct – it has been shown even in earlier in this thread that the reported case numbers are outside of the 3s confidence interval of this specific type of clots in general population and even more so in the specific sub population of middle aged women.
By now everyone agrees that it is a side effect but still a rare one – the article Peter quoted is a good one on the facts.
Where?
As I said earlier, if there is data showing the expected rate in the population of equivalent age to those that have recieved the vaccine (and there maybe) then there is a case. I havent seen this data.
Malibuflyer wrote:
By now everyone agrees that it is a side effect but still a rare one – the article Peter quoted is a good one on the facts.
Simply not true.
The EMA said yesterday there is no evidence to suggest a link but does not rule out the fact that there might be one. Of course you can’t rule it out…. proving a negative is close to impossible.
Malibuflyer wrote:
Did UK have similar cases but failed to make the link to vaccination?
Nobody has ‘made the link’, not even in the EU. What they’ve done is observed the events. To make a link you need some statistical data or a plausible mechanism of action – preferably both. The claim that the number of these especially-rare clotting events exceeds that expected as background noise is highly debatable since these events are so rare that no-one really knows what the background level is. Lamborghinis are a rare sight and I’ve never seen one go past my house, but if I see two on the same day that doesn’t mean their sales are up.
Halting vaccinations was the wrong decision, both scientifically and politically, and it is likely that the AZ vaccine will struggle to regain acceptance and the EU’s programme will thus be delayed even further. Perhaps it will give them the excuse they need to try and stop Pfizer exporting, but as I’ve said before I doubt the Americans will stand for that.
In a couple of years when all this is over someone will do the maths and establish how many people died to try and help the EC save face.
Fuji_Abound wrote:
Where?
Maybe he refers to this..
Not quite that far out. By 3s @Malibuflyer probably means three sigma (only 0.3% of all values are outside that band around the mean); the value I calculated for the poisson distribution was more around 3% (the equivalent in a standard distribution would be two sigma); so certainly a significant signal. One would expect such a cluster of events once every five years or so.
But given the low number of cases, pausing was not a good idea; even IF there is a link the right decision is to continue.
