>These include France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands - not really a politically homogeneous bunch.

Litterally all members of the same economic and political Union. The EU.

Sure, but the EU is not a federation. There are still many divergent interests between these nations. Take the Netherlands and Italy for example - not a lot of agreement between those two, usually that is. They do seem to agree on AstraZeneca though.

This. I've lived in both Germany and UK and from my humble experience with both the government and the health standards, I think it's more likely the UK/AZ are downplaying this. It could be that they are right and the impact is minimal given that millions of people have been vaccinated. But I do believe the german version here more. The tory government can't be trusted.

Are you saying the NHS is complicit in hiding deaths due to vaccines?

I find so many of my British friends who are attacking the NHS-of-Germany (for being overly political in this scenario) while totally missing the point that British NHS could be doing exactly the same thing at the same time.

That being said a lot of Europeans who would come to the UK would be appalled by the quality of NHS compared to other European countries.

So I would argue that I would trust what German NHS says more than the British one.

Where did I mention the NHS? I'm referring to the government downplaying the impact of the vaccine. Which could be true, because millions of people got the vaccine and only a few had the clot issue. But I would rather believe the german version on this.

Why do you believe there's a link to blood-clotting, and not to, say, broken dishwashers?

People (especially on HN) like to say "correlation doesn't equal causation", but there isn't even a correlation here. There are not higher rates of blood clots.