The clotting with AZ is very different and more serious than what the thrombosis associated with the pill - about half of those who get it die even with best medical care. It predominanctly affects folks who would have a miniscule risk of death by Covid19, so this absolutely needs to be investigated.

I saw the description by the doctor who treated the person who died here in Norway. He called it a "catastrophe in the brain" [1] and the life just could not be saved.

It sounds really nasty. Blood clots + low blood plate count at the same time.

[1] https://www.nrk.no/norge/innlagt-helsearbeider-dode-_-unders...

Isn't the low blood platelet a direct result of the clots, isn't that expected?

Don't the clots need/use up thr platelets in the process of clotting?

Probably just a different pathway that gets activated without involvement of much platelets, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coagulation

I have no idea since I am no doctor but from what I read in the article it's not a common situation. The usual treatment for blood clots is blood thinners. Not exactly sure how they work but I've thought it thins it by lowering the number of plates.

But it seems that the spike protein on the virus/vaccine is quite similar to a protein on the blood plates so if the body has a runaway immune system response to the vaccine it could attack the blood plates too.

The implication here is that this could be true for all the vaccines, there are some similar reports in Israel which do not use the AZ vaccine.

These cases are extremely rare though which is probably the most important thing here. It should not disqualify the vaccines.

Thanks so much for the info.

I was just wondering about Israel -- they vaccinated sooo many people, if this was an issue with the body's reaction to the S protein, it should pop up in Israel too.

A few weeks after my dad had a covid vaccine he had several seizures, which have continued to happen.

On top of that, nearly 3 weeks into hospital and he caught covid. At least the vaccine worked and that's mostly sorted.

MRI says he has suffered catastrophic brain damage and is about to be released for palative care for the last

Now importantly

- I don't know which vaccine he had (and I'm certainly not going to bother my mother over that at the moment)

- He's suffered from seizures for the last few years, although those normally follow infections and high temperatures

But it's disquieting

That's awful. I'm sorry for you and your family.

"He's suffered from seizures for the last few years, although those normally follow infections and high temperatures"

A vaccine will certainly cause the body to fight the perceived infection, including with high temperatures for some people. It's possible given his history those vaccine side effects should have been considered?

I'm sorry to hear about your father's suffering. However I feel it's important for you to sound an alarm to the relevant doctors and/or public health units if you feel there's a link between his seizures and the vaccine.

Whether or not it was the AZ vaccine or not..

They know he had the vaccine and they know his medical history far more than I do - I'm not a medical expert, they are.

But are they thinking about it right now? Maybe asking them about it would trigger a response.

Yep, this^ is the point. It is amazing that this key point is missed in so many discussions.

Now.. maybe it is still worth the risk for a young 20 year old female, but I am not so sure - especially since we luckily have other vaccines that do not show this risk.

There are safer vaccines so there is little point in risking this one. That said, it depends on how many future infections people that age face.

If this vaccine is causing at most 4 deaths per million people* vs 648 recorded US covid deaths 15-24 out of a population of 43.5 million. 4 * 43.5 = ~174 < 648. So, it would have been noticeably safer for a random 20 year old American to have taken it Jan 2020 than risk covid. https://knoema.com/atlas/United-States-of-America/topics/Dem...

So if the total future infections are say 1/4 the total infections up to this point then their roughly equivalent risks. Tipping one way or the other based on actual number of infections.

* It’s rare enough that actual risks aren’t clear, but assuming the vaccine is the cause we can assume the risks are at or below that level.

Well it's certainly worth doing risk reward calculations but so far they seem pretty clearly in favour of taking the vaccine.

If you assume you are 100% getting the virus maybe. But if you take a lot of precautions, work from home, don't get out unless necessary, wear a mask... it's not clear at all.

I guess if you are very low risk. I figure as a guestimate - people killed by vaccines - prob less that 1 a day. People killed by covid - about 7000 a day. So covid looks worse. Not a sophisticated analysis although the regulators do do those.

So why not prescribe aspirin until say a month after the second dose.

Because aspirin has no meaningful impact on as severe an autoimmune platelet implosion as is described in these cases.

Are the clots any different than the ones caused by COVID-19 itself?

Do we know for sure it's just the AZ vaccine and not the body's reaction to the spike protein(that is, other vaccines should face the same issue).

Ah so its not just thickening of the blood then fair enough.

If only medicine was logical like that. Not a cake recipe.

In addition to the severity of the clots, the difference is that the side-effect is not expected and not mentioned in the patient information.

Quote from the German PEI institute [1]:

> It is true that for birth control pills thromboses, even with fatal outcome, are known as a very rare side effect. They are listed in the Summary of Product Characteristics (SmPC). The birth control pill is available only on prescription. Every woman must be informed of this risk by the prescribing physician. For the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca, there is currently a suspected very rare side effect of sinus vein thrombosis with accompanying platelet deficiency, sometimes fatal. It is not listed in the SmPC.

The whole statement is quite informative: [1] https://www.pei.de/EN/service/faq/coronavirus/faq-coronaviru...

The risk from pregnancy is way higher than the risk from covid. You'd accept a 5% risk to avoid a 10% risk, but you wouldn't accept a .5% risk to avoid a .001% risk. From the vaccine blood clot data it looks like ~.07 thousands of a percent die from blood clots, while for young people the risk of death from covid is around ~.7 thousands of a percent. Thus if a) the blood clots are caused by the AZ vaccine, and b) the risk of getting covid as an individual is <10%, taking the AZ vaccine carries a higher risk of death than not taking it does.

The vaccination pause is not about the rate of general blood clots, but a specific kind of blood clot in the brain among a younger population that’s usually way more rare.

Maybe I've missed it, but I didn't find anything in the article about whether the vaccine does need to be discontinued or not. In any case, being clear about what side effects are possible and researching them to get a better understanding is a requirement in my opinion.

You need to read the VG articles, they are much more thorough than the one linked on HN but they are in Norwegian. Google Translate does a fair job.

https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/QmwR1V/professor-om-mi...

https://www.vg.no/nyheter/innenriks/i/KyWoy6/jakter-astrazen...

A key quote from the second of those is this:

Madsen har tidligere forklart at det er to nivåer å undersøke bivirkninger på: Gruppebasert, og individbasert. Ifølge Madsen det ikke er noe som tyder på at AstraZeneca-vaksinen er forbundet med en større risiko for blodpropp i statistikken – men det de undersøker, er om det kan finnes bivirkninger som er spesielle og rammer få personer.

My translation:

Madsen has earlier explained that there are two levels of investigation regarding side effects: group based and individual. Accoeding to Madsen there is nothing to indicate that the AstraZeneca vaccine is associated with a greater risk of blood clots in the statistics - but what they are investigating is whether there are side effects that are special and affect few people.

This comment should not be downvoted as it is both topical and helpful.

Thank you. I wish downvoting had to be accompanied by a reason!

Downvotes have nothing to do with topicality and helpfulness. They are purely a mechanism for sharing and reinforcing social norms by promoting and protecting The Narrative.

it doesn't make sense to stop a vaccination campaign if a small number of people have side effects, assuming the vaccination utility is high.

Utility is compared against other choices of vaccine and how much more time it would take to distribute those instead, or compared against not giving it to certain groups that are susceptible to the reaction (and the time it takes to find those groups), not against doing nothing.

One is voluntary, one is not (not really). There's a huge difference in a vaccine for everyone causing deaths and medication you can live without that you chose to take. There's nothing comparable between the two.

I heard a doctor comment yesterday that seems to summarize what's happening: "It's perceived as worse to actively kill someone than to kill them through inaction; the scale doesn't matter."

So even if the vaccine is responsible for these deaths, the people making the administration decisions will choose having 10x or 100x the number of people die from not getting them vaccinated quickly. So much for "science-based decision-making"...

Trolley problem with a needle and some dice

Covid has a certain chance of killing any particular person (not the same chance for each person), the vaccine has a much lower chance than average COVID and prevents the COVID chance.

This vaccine has a much lower chance of killing you than COVID on average. From which you cannot draw the conclusion that vaccine has a much lower chance of killing any particular person - e.g. a healthy 20-something. That part is not at all clear.

I'm bothered by two things.

The first is multivariate studies are notorious for throwing false positives especially when positive cases are in the sigle digits.

Comparing data sets collected under different surveillance regimes is difficult.

Just because apples and oranges can both rot doesn't mean they are both bad. There are different things at play here.

First, the vaccine: Allowing a vaccine that kills people can have very real consequences that go beyond Covid. Vaccines should be as safe as possible, and not doing so can push more folks into vaccine skepticism and anti-vaccine stances. The Covid vaccine making blood clots really can not only mean the pandemic lasts longer and folks stop taking MMR vaccines. That is enough of an issue as-is. The other thing with this particular issue is that it is just one of the vaccines that is doing it - there are other choices, and it just slows how quickly we can vaccinate folks.

As far as contraceptive pills: First, doctors do look at risk factors. Some years back, when I still smoked, my doctor wouldn't give me a pill with estrogen in it because of my age plus smoking meant I had a bigger risk of blood clots. It's OK, like the covid jab, I had other options. The other thing that is really important is that the birth control pill, even with the risk of blood clots, severely cuts the risk of death for some folks. Some women bleed so severely that it risks their health each month. And more to the point, it does a decent job of preventing pregnancy.

Being pregnant - and giving birth - is really, really dangerous, but we sometimes forget this because modern medicine has made death rates drop.

You and a criminal both breath, does this mean you should also be arrested?

This makes no sense whatsoever. It just sounds smart, but it totally misses the point. Both are medications. Both are taken by healthy individuals. The comparison is sound and makes sense.

Are all medications vaccines? Are all medications used to prevent an highly transmissive disease? Are all medications designed to be administered within a short period of time? Come on it doesn't take a genius to see it's an apple to orange comparison

> Are all medications used to prevent an highly transmissive disease

We may argue this makes any rare side effect from the vaccine, which is meant to avoid a potentially serious illness, more acceptable than those from the pill.

Sure, if we have no alternatives, and the news of these side effects will not impact the rollout of other vaccines

Criminals aren't arrested for breathing. Next!

Boeing 737 max has a lower crash rate than cars, do you think the ban was warranted?

Again, that's comparing apples and oranges. Not to mention, what's the cost-adjusted safety comparison look like, given that a 737 costs more than a thousand cars!

Your whataboutism needs some work.

That's exactly my point, it's an apple to orange comparison, I've intentionally left out other dimensions of comparison and cherry picked something that's similar, which is exactly what original post was doing between contraceptive and the vaccines

Cars should also be banned and replaced with alternatives (be it safe self driving tech, public transit or biking). Car crashes are one of the top killers of young people in terms of crashes, and we’re just starting to understand the effects of air pollution on young lungs.

Or maybe stop banning things and let people make their own decisions.

If drivers were the only ones impacted, I’d agree. For example professional race car drivers have all consented to the risks, so what they do on the race track is up to them. But when cars are used for general transportation there are all kinds of negative externalities that people can’t opt out of.

Other people are always impacted by our decisions. That's just the world we live in. Damn near everything you do affects the people around you in some way.

Do the people around alcoholics consent to that?

At some point the risks/reward of various behaviors (let alone the substances that enable them, you don't see people scrambling to ban belts because people hit their kids with them) are such that legislating away things with varying degrees of state violence to back it up isn't worth the tradeoff.

In the UK 40 people standing on a sidewalk are killed by car drivers every year

In my local town a couple of months ago a car driver managed to embed their car in a house, fortunately the resident was upstairs at the time and not sitting in their living room, otherwise they would have been dead

Last week another driver hit a stone column, 3' from the road (with sidewalk between), damaging a 500 year old building and meaning the residents had to be evacuated. They're still in a hotel.

How do you propose those people make their own decisions?

What about WMDs? Where do you suggest we draw the line?