This was what I posted in this post about the European Medicines Agency acknowledging the AstraZeneca vaccine (which I was inoculated with) was linked to something never seen before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725232

> "Zero surprises here. Both Norwegian and German research teams identified the /actual specific novel antibody/ that causes this /new previously unclassified syndrome/ that was effectively unheard of before the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine existed. Also, both teams are phenomenally talented for identifying this antibody so quickly. Usually it is on “finding a needle in a haystack” level difficulty. BTW, I am probably going to get downvoted but I am definitely not an antivaxxer and I received the AZ vaccine as innoculation for COVID-19."

In both cases, the situation is clinically similar to Heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT), although there are very distinct differences. It should not be used as a comparison.

This is a good peer-reviewed journal article on diagnosis and management [4]. This is another article describing the syndrome [5].

I should emphasize that the treatment that is used for this specific syndrome is extremely expensive: intravenous immunoglobulin. I personally take the same medication (immunoglobulin) subcutaneously (under-the-skin) twice per week, for 2 rare immune-mediated neurological diseases affecting my peripheral nervous system. I will require this medication for life. When I lived in the USA (I live in Croatia now), my medical insurance was paying $278,000/year for the medication, under contract. I am not talking about how much the medication was being billed for, which was way higher. So, you heard me right, my insurance paid $278,000/year for this type of medication.

[1] Here’s what we know about J&J’s vaccine and rare blood clots: https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2021-04-13/what-we-kno...

[2] ‘It’s a very special picture.’ Why vaccine safety experts put the brakes on AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/03/it-s-very-special-pi...

[3] Norwegian experts say deadly blood clots were caused by the AstraZeneca covid vaccine: https://sciencenorway.no/covid19/norwegian-experts-say-deadl...

[4] Diagnosis and Management of Vaccine-RelatedThrombosis following AstraZeneca COVID-19Vaccination: Guidance Statement from the GTH: https://zlmsg.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/2021_Diagnosis-a...

[5] A Prothrombotic Thrombocytopenic Disorder Resembling Heparin-Induced Thrombocytopenia Following Coronavirus-19 Vaccination: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-362354/v1

I think we would all be fascinated to hear first hand accounts from someone who's also experienced the abysmal US system.

What does your immunoglobulin cost in Croatia?

I also have a separate issue, Pectus Excavatum, a chest deformity that required me to undertake a fairly difficult surgery called the Nuss Procedure.

I think these two examples do a good job at demonstrating differences between Croatian an US healthcare payment systems. They are very different medical problems.

Diabetes is a chronic illness that requires constant management. I need to inject insulin multiple times a day and require other supplies such as sugar sensors, lancets, needles, and glucose strips. I have a brother who still lives in Croatia and also has Diabetes Type 1. Our treatment plans are almost identical. We take the same medications and need the same supplies.

Managing Diabetes in the US is fairly annoying and expensive. I'm lucky to work in tech which provides me with good pay and insurance but even then my expenses can go up to $200/mo. It is also difficult, sometimes impossible, to get insurance authorization for better insulins that are widely available in Europe. I am on Humalog, or sometimes Novolog, similar insulins but insurance companies only cover a single one, so you have to switch when you change insurances. Newer insulins such as Fiasp, Apidra, or Tresiba, which are newer, quicker to work, and overall "better" are almost impossible to get in the US. I tried multiple times and the insurance never gave me the authorization to use them.

My brother lives in Zagreb, Croatia. He's been a diabetic all of his life. He's using newer insulins such as Fiasp and Tresiba and he doesn't pay anything for them. Literally 0. It's completely covered by the National Insurance. Same goes for all of the supplies like strips and needles, and glucose sensors (which can be pretty expensive in the US). In total he pays $0.00 on diabetes management.

In addition, Diabetes education is terrible in the US. Doctors here will usually tell me that I can eat whatever I want as long as I cover it with enough insulin. This is just awful advice since people are not computers and will never calculate the correct dosage of insulin they need to cover every meal; resulting in bad sugar management and complications that come with it: blindness, limb amputation, and eventually death.

The ONLY way to properly manage diabetes is to be very careful about eating carbs. Not necessarily eliminate them, but come as close to it as possible. This is the way diabetes education works in Croatia. Fix the diet and then use insulin to fix what you can't fix with diet. The result is way better sugar management, and way cheaper treatments. Just the other week I had my checkup here in the US and the doctor told me my blood sugars are "too LOW for a diabetic" (my A1c was 5.9% - still higher than the normal 5.5% for a healthy person). I should change my diet and eat more carbs to raise it up. This is just awful, awful advice and I'm sure it's the result of generally terrible diet in the US.

So overall, healthcare treatment and payment for a chronic illness like Diabetes is just immeasurably better in Croatia. It's not even a contest.

Now, on the other hand.

Pectus Excavatum is a bone deformity. In some cases it's small enough to not present any problems but if it's fairly severe it can cause a lot of cardiovascular issues. Nuss procedure involves implanting multiple steel bars (3 in my case) behind the chest wall in order to force the chest bone out. The bars stay in the body for 3 years and are then removed. Surgery is usually successful and after the bars are removed you are considered "cured". There is nothing more to manage and the rate of complications is very low.

This surgery is complicated. It's most often done on children because it becomes much more difficult to perform it in adults. Video if interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8SrRzJqbJ8

As an adult, it's almost impossible to get the surgery performed in Europe. I know there's a center in Italy, and another Netherlands that do perform it, but their rate of success is not great. I've seen a lot of people complain about the results. The place to do it is the United States. Mayo Clinic in Arizona has the absolute world expert on Nuss Procedure and she does surgeries on adult of up to 40ish years of age (I got in at 37, last chance). Her work is absolutely phenomenal and people from all over the world travel to Arizona to do it there. There are also hospitals in Missouri I think and in New Jersey that do it, but I'm less familiar with them.

Now given that there are only a handful of places in the world that perform this surgery on adults, you'd think that the cost of this procedure would be astronomical. In total I paid around $2000 out of pocket. Without insurance it costs around $30k, plus $10k or so for the hospital bed (oh US). Don't get me wrong, it's not cheap, but for something of such difficulty and expertise I expected it to be way more expensive. It's literally impossible to get in most of the world other than the US and it costs less than the price of diabetes supplies for 1 year.

So there you have it. In my opinion the US system is absolutely awful for managing chronic conditions. It's made to exploit you for as much money as possible and even give you bad medical advice that makes sure you're going to need those expensive supplies. On the other hand, the most difficult procedures in the world are sometimes only available in the US, and the price of those is not nearly as high as you'd expect it to be. It's great for acute treatable conditions, and absolutely awful for chronic conditions that require constant management.

Covid kills X. Vaccine Kills Y. Everyone is stupid.

Programmers (and I'm one of them) are very black/white thinkers. Very few people on here had said ANYTHING that the radio said today: The pause give us the opportunity to train nurses and doctors to immediately identify the blood clot and make correct recommendations based on that. Typical anti-clotting protocols make this worse. The pause helps us get this communication out.

It's all identity politics at this point. Anyone has anything bad to say about a vaccine and suddenly the anti-anti-vaxxers pop up. Now that Trump criticized the pause I'm sure there's going to be a wildly popular support for this pause.

Unless this is a repeat of AstraZeneca, where many were lamenting the interruption of vaccination and calculating the risk for the entire population of people injected with AZ. Meanwhile, in some countries, the risk of dying from the vaccine for young women was higher than the risk of dying from the virus.

After the concerns about AZ turned out to be justified and AZ being banned for certain age groups you'd think that people would get a clue about unconditional vaccine cheerleading.

Do you have a good source you'd recommend for this? I couldn't find this bit of info from the first few articles I skimmed.

> After the concerns about AZ turned out to be justified and AZ being banned for certain age groups you'd think that people would get a clue about unconditional vaccine cheerleading.

Who is unconditionally cheerleading which vaccines?

Women < 60 years: 10 deaths from covid-19 in total [0]. Four vaccine-related deaths were reported in young, relatively healthy women. Details on three of the vaccine-related deaths have been published [1]. One of the stories had been made public [2].

The astrazeneca vaccine was put on hold, if not, it's not hard to imagine the number of fatalities surpassing the number of covid-19-related deaths, even when ignoring comorbidities

[0] https://www.fhi.no/en/id/infectious-diseases/coronavirus/dai...

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104882

[2] https://www.vg.no/nyheter/i/GaOr3l/monica-aafloey-hansen-54-...

Edit, please correct me if I'm wrong, it's very important that we don't spread false information regarding this.

Edit 2: There seems to be four, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202103/1219441.shtml

[0] https://www.nrk.no/innlandet/helsearbeider-pa-tynset-dode-ti...

I had blood clots in my lungs last week a few days after getting the J&J vaccine. I'm an otherwise totally healthy man in my 30s, no preconditions. The hospital reported it to the vaccine reporting agency, which I assume is reviewing all this information.

I'm not sure if they considered my case when making this decision. My clots were different type than what these women experienced (pulmonary, not cerebral).

Of course vaccinating the public is extremely important right now. If the risks of clotting really are 1 in a million, it makes sense to re-instate it. I also think that's an obvious conclusion and the people working on this are well aware of the public health trade-off.

I suspect they are working with more information than what's in the press release, and its prudent to give them some time to work through it.

Make sure to never forget to take your blood thinning medicine. You absolutely must get the blood clots completely dissolved, and the blood thinner medicine is highly effective at getting rid of it, if you take it.

If we assume that only 5% of cases are being detected and reported correctly, then the numbers look quite different.

In comparison there have been over 2000 deaths reported (US, all vaccines). But death is not unusual and unless one can find a specific link to vaccination that number alone is not alarming. Sometimes we live with known risk, anaphylactic shocks e.g., because they are unavoidable and benefits outweigh risk. But we do what we can to mitigate such risk.

In summary the current pause is triggered by the particular type of clotting, not just any clotting. But your case should contribute to the overall evaluation of the likely cause and risk.

But, IDK and I’m super skeptical they’re willing to halt vaccine and take this hit for 6 known cases. My guess is 6 deaths they’re willing to acknowledge and a few more cases that will come out.

But again, I know nothing and I would’ve expected their stock price to take a hit today.

Hope you get better soon.

So I think that's why they're telling people to watch for leg pain. I didn't have any issues with my legs, but it's apparently a common symptom to have pain and swelling there.

What is someone getting a vaccine as such is supposed to look for?

Eventually the pain was severe enough that I went to the ER.

Looking back, the shortness of breath was a key indicator. It wasn't that I was struggling to breathe or anything, but I felt like I couldn't take a big deep breath easily and that's not normal.

The pain would also get worse at night when I tried to lie down to go to sleep. I thought I had pulled a muscle in my back at first, but it was quite painful.

But last week (would have been 3 weeks after shot) I awoke in the middle of the night with pretty a bad chest pain like you describe. Felt like it was in middle of my chest and was quite painful. I had to physically sit up in my bed for about 5 minutes hoping it would subside. I got up and got some water and hoped it didn't get worse as I started contemplating what I should do if it does.

I was so tired though I just propped myself up with pillows and slept sitting up against the headboard because laying down seemed to make it come back worse. I eventually fell asleep and when I woke for the day I still felt a small amount of pain still. Went about my day normally and it seemed to go away later in the day.

I would think I am out of the window by now after 4 weeks to which I am in any danger from what I'm reading on news sites? I've been the gym since that episode and have done cardio fine. My wife suggests I take some low-dose aspirin for next few days.

I would also not dismiss the nagging feeling in the back of your head that something doesn’t feel right. You know your body more than anyone.

It went away after that night, he was fine for 3 weeks with no pain or issues, was working out fine, etc. and thought nothing of it.

Suddenly one night went from perfectly fine sleeping to suffering a major stroke due to a blood clot in his brain within a 10 minute period, unable to do anything himself to get help as he lost all motor skills.

He said in retrospect he wishes he had followed up with a doctor on the thing he thought was no longer an issue 3 weeks before.

There are genetic tests they can run, as well, such as to see if you might have factor V Leiden.

They then put me on pain meds and supplemental oxygen for a few days and watched me. The pain went away after a few days (I assume when the inflammation went down).

They didn’t actually treat the clots themselves. The body apparently does that itself over the course of a few weeks and months. There are invasive surgical ways to try to break them up but they felt I wasn’t bad enough to risk it since I could sit up and breathe on my own.

They checked my heart for tissue damage and thankfully didn’t find any. So now they’re doing a slew of tests to find the cause (genetics? Cancer? So far tests show cancer is unlikely).

Recovery has been good to be honest. I’m not really in pain. I do get out of breathe very easily but they say that’s normal and should go away in a few weeks as the clots dissipate. The lung damage should heal, I think.

The real danger from more clots to the brain or damaging the heart are prevented by the blood thinners, which are apparently highly effective. So I think I got lucky and I’m glad I went to the ER when I did.

I've noticed you, specifically, posting pro-virus misinformation since the very beginning. Half a million people died, man. I wish you would just spare us your trolling, damn it!

What are you even referring to? Literally no one has to get a vaccine if they don't want it. Nobody in the comment chain you're replying in had advocated for forced innoculation. This is 100% already a "their body, their choice" situation.

Blood clots cause strokes. You have no idea if Covid treatment increases your odds of having a stroke in 10 years. I invite you to study the history of various medical treatments that turned out to have unintended consequences on unsuspecting populations. Good luck either way. Stay healthy and stay free.

For example, you can't easily prove that your comment here is not causing me to develop a blood clot if I develop one.

Which is why we try to prove positives: who else has developed a blood clot after reading your comment? Is there any correlation? Anything to suggest there is causation too? What would be the hypothesis.

You are right that vaccines are not proven to be perfectly safe (and to be honest, none of them are even with longer testing time). But you are still muddying the waters by throwing these "prove a negative" statements.

The risk with coronavirus vaccines today is that the risks are not fully known (unlike with other, more established, vaccines for other diseases). Risks of getting coronavirus is also not fully established, though we know it can be pretty severe.

It would be only natural to expect some similar immune response from COVID and vaccines causing similar issues in the body, but that's totally hypothetical until proven to be the case.

Data so far points that it's much less likely for someone to develop issues from a vaccine than from COVID itself (roughly 10000 less likely at least), so it's up to the individual to assess if they are less likely to contract COVID and get serious symptoms, or get serious symptoms out of vaccination.

No source.

Also statistically unknowable at this point. But a 34 and under year old already has less than a 1 in 100K chance of dying from Covid. That is to say, an under 34 year old is more likely to die of murder than die of Covid. Anywhere from 4-10x more likely in the U.S. depending on the city.

https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...

"10000 less likely" was derived from 1 in 6 million compared to a global death rate of roughly 2%, then allowing for roughly an order of magnitude error: not scientific at all, I agree.

Taking your numbers as undisputable while not acknowledging that they are as uncertain as "the other side" is a bit dishonest in my opinion.

"The full research, development and approval process can last from 12 to 15 years."

"If the FDA gives the green light, the investigational drug will then enter three phases of clinical trials:

Phase 1: About 20 to 80 healthy volunteers to establish a drug's safety and profile, and takes about 1 year. Safety, metabolism and excretion of the drug are also emphasized. Phase 2: Roughly 100 to 300 patient volunteers to assess the drug's effectiveness in those with a specific condition or disease. This phase runs about 2 years. Groups of similar patients may receive the actual drug compared to a placebo (inactive pill) or other active drug to determine if the drug has an effect. Safety and side effects are reviewed. Phase 3: Typically, several thousand patients are monitored in clinics and hospitals to carefully determine effectiveness and identify further side effects. Different types and age ranges of patients are evaluated. The manufacturer may look at different doses as well as the experimental drug in combination with other treatments. This phase runs about about 3 years on average."

https://www.drugs.com/fda-approval-process.html

If you had had observations of subjects lasting 10 years - your overall process would be much much longer than 10-12 years.

And when I hear rumblings of vaccine passports and all this nonsense in the news and I see some people's general attitude towards Covid vaccination: you're either for it or you're a flat earthling neophyte.

At any rate, point I'm trying to make:

There's less than 3700 deaths for Under 34 year olds in the United States, from Covid19 [1].

And that number will go down with every year that passes from here on out, because a broader percentage of that demographic already has herd immunity. In fact, there's much more important health problems to focus on for those demographics. Suicide, heart disease, homicide, car accidents, liver disease, diabetes, etc.

Population under 34: 148M Covid19 deaths under 34 in first year of existence, with no immunity in population: 3710

Flu & pneumonia deaths for pop under 34 in 2018 was 1857 [3].

Odds of dying of Covid19 under 34 in first year of its existence: .0025%

Odds of long-term consequences from RNA therapy from AZ, J&J, or Pfizer treatment: ???

Unknown. It could increase your odds of having a stroke at in 10 years. No one knows. If it's causing blood clots, that's a distinct possibility.

[1] https://www.heritage.org/data-visualizations/public-health/c... [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the... [3] https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...

- these are vaccines, they aren’t gene therapy (ie they aren’t changing cellular DNA)

- saying a portion of the population has herd immunity is non-sensical. Either there’s herd immunity (virus can’t spread bc everyone has antibodies) or there isn’t. It happens at specific thresholds of population exposure/antibody presence that varies based on the R of the virus. It was estimated at ~70% for the ‘original’ virus and with the UK/SA variants now looks to be north of 80%.

- even with exposure, there are case reports of reinfect ion which makes sense in the history of coronaviruses which aren’t considered to provide long term immunity (ie antibody titre falls off and may not provide immunity in some short term horizon, ie 18 months)

- therefore, return to normal relies on elimination of community spread, by herd immunity, which likely will require vaccination; which will hopefully provide longer term immunity than infection with the virus itself (not sure on the evidence on this)

I agree that population that has low statistical risk shouldn’t be pressured into vaccination, and I see the dangers in vaccine passports etc.

To another point you made, regarding long term risks and generally the history of misguided attempts by the medical community to do something that has severe deleterious longer term effects that were unforeseen: I am signicantly less concerned about the risk of ie long term stroke risk being raised in this population, because the emerging evidence points to a HITTs-like antibody mediated condition.

In Heparin induced thrombocytopaenia and thrombosis, removal of trigger removes long term risk and I would think that no further antibody triggering thrombosis should be produced after the acute period in those affected (and indeed in that very large fragment of the population who don’t develop CVTS or vaccine mediated thrombosis, which does seem confined to those who had vaccine via adenovirus vectors), then it should be a non-issue because the autoantibody was never produced in the first place and there are no memory cells there ready to pump it out again at antigen presentation.

Of course, I qualify this with its possible, and you’re free to dismiss my confidence, but we have a plausible mechanism that is relatively well understood so I think the risk of there being long term risks is very low

You obviously have strong feelings about this because you came into the thread with big broad claims, but you seem to be taking disagreement from others very personally.

It's pretty obvious if you read my comment. You said, "Stop violating people's human rights", and I said nobody's rights are being violated. Putting it to you as clearly as possible, your rights are not being violated until you are being strapped into a chair and having a vaccine forced into you, and that's simply not going to happen.

Some regions may adopt a "passport" system for the relative short-term but even then, you still do not have to get a vaccine if you don't want to. You just may have to wait a little bit longer than the vaccinated to get back to participating in certain things, but you would still be exercising your right to not get vaccinated.

It's as simple as that, and has nothing to do with the rambling that followed your question.

I meant the original comment where you levied a personal attack against me. I stated my opinion in earnest. I've been posting on HN for better part of a decade, and you levy a personal assault on me. At any rate, I want you to understand: it's perfectly ok, and perfectly acceptable for there to be people in the world who have different opinions than you, and that does not make them a troll.

The above was my rationalization, with sources that you probably didn't bother to read, for my original comment where you made the personal attack and assaulted my character. At any rate, this conversation is done. Stay healthy and stay free, my friend.

I think you mean me. What I actually wrote was:

> Comment history on the topic of COVID is littered with trollish behavior and bonkers-bad reasoning fitting a pattern.

And I stand by that statement. You've had a long history of rolling out dubious arguments and posting inflammatory misinformation with a deliberate agenda to minimize COVID from the very beginning, the whole damn year. I have no idea why. Your comments on other topics seem reasonable and level-headed, but your COVID trolling is just off the charts. I wish you would just stop it. The world hasn't even processed the trauma of going through millions of deaths, we're finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, and we got you out here just making more noises again, with driveby doubt mongering. Every. damn. time. Only with one more zero on the death counts each time. Please, just can it, dude. What are you hoping to accomplish? Talking people out of getting vaccines? You're afraid that you need to take a vaccine, because it's just the sniffles, or something? Fuck off with that already, the world's been on fire for a year. People I know have died. Friends of mine have long COVID. Friends of mine are doctors, nurses, who have seen thousands die. Fuck off with your stupid "gene therapy" fear mongering, on exactly the wrong thing, in exactly the wrong direction, at exactly the wrong time.

My first comment in this thread was where I told you that your rights were not being violated. My second comment was my clarification. This is my third. There have been no personal attacks directed toward you from me - if you feel differently, please highlight where you feel I attacked you.

I urge you to pay better attention.

Can't you flip that around? No one has any clue as to the long term side effects of Covid-19. The under 30 odds of death for getting the vaccine are statistically zero percent.

1 death. The other cases are severe blood clotting but still alive by my understanding.

That's literally one-in-6-million chance of death with regards to this blood-clotting issue. A vanishingly smaller chance than the 1-in-40,000 (or 150-in-6-million) a healthy young person has of dying of COVID19.

So 1 death, 5 severe reactions related to blood clotting. Definitely a cause of concern, but lets not overplay the stats here.

This just another "Trolley problem": 150-people (even youngsters) would die from COVID19 vs the 1-person who died from the J&J vaccine.

If we include the general population (instead of focusing on the youngest and healthiest of us): COVID19 mortality rate is 1%ish, or 60,000-people-per-6-million.

You have to multiply the IFR by the odds that the person gets COVID to begin with. In countries where there's no community transmission (Australia) or in countries where it's possible to kill the virus just by vaccinating the at-risk population combined with shut-downs, the multiplier should be pretty small. Even in countries that have handled it badly, it still might be only a 1/3 or 1/2 chance of catching it. So as a young healthy person my chances of dying from COVID are probably less than 1/100000.

I bring this up because I think it misses the actual point. Even if the vaccine had a 1/100000 chance of death or major complications, I would still take it. Because my life is not the only one that matters. Killing the virus is likely (in this country) to require most people who are physically capable (including the young) of taking the vaccine. My taking on a 1/100k risk with the vaccine vs a 1/100k risk without the vaccine is worth it, because for most other adults, the risk is much greater than 1/100k if the population doesn't get vaccinated.

Fortunately, I don't think pausing J&J is necessarily the wrong decision, even given the argument I just made. AFAIK it's the least common of the three vaccines, and so there should not be many "missing" vaccinations that result from the pause. The fact that taking a risk is justified does not mean that pointless risk is justified.

Walk-ins might be affected, though, but I'm not sure what percentage of the total daily vaccinations are walk-ins vs. appointments.

And as a sibling mentions, the general risk of dying from COVID-19 is not 150 in 6M, because the probability of getting (symptomatic) COVID-19 needs to be factored into that figure. I would not be surprised that if that probability drops to under 1 in 6M after accounting for that, though of course the symptomatic infection risk differs based on demographics.

One thing that I am worried about, though, is that this might make people trust all the vaccines less in general. My girlfriend and I had J&J appointments for this Friday; fortunately we were able to get a walk-in Moderna shot today, but the issues with the J&J vaccine did give her a little anxiety even about the Moderna vaccine. I think that (and worse) might be pretty common, and isn't unreasonable.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/infectious-agent...

It takes quite a long time to prove the link between a viral infection and a cancer that develops decades later, so it'll be a while before we know for sure.

There are other potential longer term side effects that at least seem to have some emerging data to back them up, which seem more concerning to me.

I don't agree with the premise behind this reasoning, but I can see how it'd come about.

While this is not cancer, for those poor souls, a lifetime spent struggling to breathe is not much better.

I don’t think that’s accurate in this case. The type of vaccine that J&J released had up until months ago only ever been deployed in animals.

IIRC pigs had a problem with corona viruses that we solved”

The J&J is not a heap of dead virus like the common ones we have had forever. But a live harmless (we think) virus dolled up to look like Rona Corona.

No, there have been no previous live viruses that have been genetically modified to look like other viruses (embedding Covid spike proteins) injected in humans before three months ago in any scale.

We have treated animals with exactly this however, including pigs against piggy rona.

I recommend reading the whole post next time, not just stopping at “live virus”.

I bet if I went today he wouldn’t be so dismissive.

Typically they investigate with multiple tools - a CT scan, a D-Dimer blood test, and often an ultrasound to check blood flow in limbs etc.

that we know of.

I suspect the lack of understanding about what is happening, and what other knock-on effects there might be is what is behind this.

If a wing falls off of one airplane in a million, we still stop and try to figure out what happened because as far as we know, wings are not supposed to fall off any airplanes, so there's something about the system we need to learn more about.

We don't have the same absolute understanding of mechanisms with vaccines. Therefore, I am not sure we can use this metaphore to suggest that it is the right choice in this terrible time to stop vaccinations, causing slowdowns to happen and scepticism to spread in the population that is bombarded by the press which creates an echo chamber repeating over and over superficial news.

I personally don't expect a vaccine, nor any medicine in general, to be supposed to have absolutely zero incidence of possible negative side effects.

We aren't stopping vaccinations. We are stopping this vaccine. For the moment. To gather more information. Which is precisely the kind of responsible behavior that we need, if we want people to be less skeptical of the vetting process for these vaccines.

>We don't have the same absolute understanding of mechanisms with vaccines.

Wouldn't this support more caution, not less?

>We don't have the same absolute understanding of mechanisms with vaccines.

Having even less knowledge about how vaccines and our immune systems work seems like reason to be even more cautious, not less cautious.

Especially considering the fact that autoimmune disorders have been on the rise for decades, and we don't know why.

Could it be that we are simply diagnosing them better?

Just throwing it out there as a plausible explanation since autoimmune disorders are commonly diagnosed based on a multitude of symptoms none of which definitely indicates an autoimmune disorder independently; similarly, I find it highly likely the rise in cancer diagnosis to be at least partially linked to better diagnostics too.

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/dvt/features/blood-clot-risk.html

We apparently don't know that, which is why they are pausing to examine the safety of the vaccine.

For the record, I'm not coming down on one side or the other of this argument, just pointing out what the calculus they seem to be operating under is.

This is the reason people lost trust in the medical community during COVID.

I understand the need for being cautious and for transparency. Actually, I would like to have even more transparency and actual scientific data and numbers from the news. That would help the public understand better why certain decisions are made.

(Maybe my main problem is just with mainstream press, not much with stopping vaccinations per se. I'd just like to know more and be told by politicians: we are listening to scientists, these are the data, this is how numbers compare to the incidence of other side effects for well known medicines and to the numbers of daily deaths and long term problems caused by COVID, and the decisions are taken because X > Y).

Here is a small problem with this that makes me also consider if I want to take a shot with AZ even if I registered for it months ago waiting for my place:

Before EU started discussing the issue with statistical signifiant number of cases of blood clots in vaccinated population UK Reported 5 cases of blot clots in vaccinated population.

After EU talked second time to suspend vaccination with AZ lo and behold UK discovered that it missed in previous months to report 25 more cases.

Now should I trust any of these agencies that they are telling the truth? I am starting not.

But I had a mild COVID and I am sure after experiencing those symptoms that I really want a vaccine. I am not willing to experience a reinfection.

Also I was able to get another appointment for Moderna vaccine next week. So I just have to spend another 4 weeks or so social distancing. It is better than developing blood clots, imo.

I suspect that what's happening is that these institutions don't think in consequentialist point of view. They are not comfortable with diverting the trolley even if the math checks out.

> Now, your risk of dying either from vaccination or Covid19 depends on various demographic factors

Your risk of dying, or other health injury, depends on your personal health factors specifically.

Demographic is the statistical data of a population.

1. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/13/blood-clots-more-likely-from...

If we assume an average of 32km round trip to get to a vaccination site (~10 miles each way). Statistically speaking at least one person has died driving in their car to get the vaccine. The same number as from the vaccine.

I couldn't find good stats on serious injuries per km driven, but I suspect it's an order of magnitude higher than deaths per km. Your risk of dying on your way to get the vaccine is the same as your risk of dying from the vaccine. You are, almost certainly, far more likely to be seriously injured on your way to get the vaccine than you are from the vaccine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

I'm certainly not denying Covid19, but I do take all the statistics with a grain of salt. It's important to understand that those people died with, not necessarily of Covid19. Also, why are so many positive tested persons without any signs of illness? I wonder what numbers would result in testing every death for other viruses.

The best, maybe only number we can properly compare is the total death rate. In doing so we see that Covid19 causes additional deaths, but it is far from as severe as the media and politics suggest.

The vaccine is eventually going to be mandated to go back to the office, go places, etc.. That’s a risk that you can’t avoid and will have to take.

I’m all for vaccinations and get them when needed, I’m still not comfortable for vaccines that have not been approved. Right now, they all have emergency approval and not overall approval. According to the cdc, vaccines need at least ten years of data to be considered safe for use. We’re only a little over a year into the development of the vaccine. Not really safe in my eyes.

Except for that the government covering up the MMR investigation instead of doing it openly is what caused the anti-vaxx movement in the first place. Compare that with the public rallying around J&J after their Tylenol recall.

As we analyze the data, and see if more data comes in the next two weeks, we'll have a better sense of the risk.

If it can be isolated to certain groups, then those groups could be offered alternatives. The UK did something like that, and it worked well for them. It's not just about an overall number - it's about how effectively this risk can be reduced.

> Just saying to wait is a decision that will kill people.

J&J was a very small proportion of vaccines. There is plenty of extra supply from Moderna and Pfizer in the US, so you'll need a citation that this will kill people.

For people under 30, particularly women, the risk of blood clots from AZ is higher, while at the same time the risk from coronavirus infection is lower. When there are alternative vaccines available with no evidence of similar side effects, it makes sense to temporarily stop administering AZ/J&J to those groups to investigate if there are any risk factors we can use to predict and protect those who may be most vulnerable to side effects. (It has been suggested that young women on certain types of birth control are at highest risk of blood clots after AZ.)

That said, as some have pointed out, the risk of blood clots is still thought to be very low, even for women under 30, and anti-vax groups as well as the vaccine hesitant may see this news as a sign that it's not safe for anyone to take any vaccine. However, I don't think we as a society should actively try to conceal news or research about vaccine safety so that people don't worry. In my opinion, people have a right to know, and efforts to conceal concerning information often backfire, producing more public distrust.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ey2oowQWgAApGnK?format=jpg&name=...

It's much, much worse to kill someone with a vaccine than to allow that person to perhaps die of a virus.

Thankfully, in this case, sanity prevailed.

Don't all vaccines have some extremely low but nonzero probability of killing someone?

> It's intolerable that people die taking a prophylactic.

What do you think about airbags in cars?

The point here is simple. It's worse for someone to die of a vaccine than for someone to die of the coronavirus. How much worse is up for debate, but it's a significant factor and napkin math has to take that into account or it's morally bankrupt.

If there’s (hypothetical overly high numbers here) a 10% chance of dying from a disease or a 1% chance of dying from the vaccine from that disease, I want the vaccine and would like the freedom to do so. But if a new vaccine is coming out and soon after we see a 1% death rate from it, now I’m gonna want to hold off and take my chances with the disease because that 1% may turn out to be as high as or greater than 10% down the track when more is known.

The main complexity here is just like the early days of coronavirus - until things have played out for a while you can’t have confidence about the extent of the harm and that’s true for both the disease (which we now have over a year of information about) and the vaccines (which we have a month or two of in-the-wild info so far).

As someone else pointed out here, you're about as statistically likely to die in a car wreck on your way to get the vaccine than you are to have (not die from) a blood clot from it.

[0] https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/cardiology/blood-clots...

My comment is more or less ridiculous, but I'd like to understand why an effective vaccine that is dangerous to a few people is different than peanuts, which are dangerous to a few people (many of whom discover this by consuming peanuts).

Would you want the chef at your local takeout to be vaccinated to 66.3% efficiency? or 94%?

Why was this vaccine even approved, instead of just having J&J produce the same vaccine Pfizer and Moderna are making, which would be in the best interest of the world? Is this some utterly idiotic capitalism bullshit that prevents J&J from making a 94% vaccine as well?

Why can't we just take $100B out of the $1T military budget, throw it at Pfizer and Moderna to shut up their patent lawyers, and then hand the formula to J&J to become a 3rd factory for a good 94% mRNA vaccine?

And then hand that formula to the rest of the world including Brazil, India, China, and other recent new COVID hotspots so that the virus doesn't boomerang back to the US in an evolved form?

At least that's what I would do if I was president.

We're not at a stage yet when we can play favorites. It'll be a long time before we have the supply to prefer one over the other (except maybe in the US where there will be enough mRNA vaccines to go around).

A vaccinated person can have no symptoms of covid and still be spreading (This may or may not be true).

Folks are still studying how effective the vaccines are at preventing spread.

Aren't the efficacy numbers from the phase 3 trials based on giving periodic PCR tests to everyone that was participating in the trials? And not just based on people self-reporting symptoms?

It would be very surprising if there were a new kind of asymptomatic carrier that emerged only for people having taken certain vaccines in which they would never test positive on a PCR test but could still spread covid. The odds that this is how the vaccines work seems very small, relative to the number of times this argument that "we don't know yet" is getting repeated.

It just seems strange to me that so many people are hung up on pointing out that this small possibility is still a possibility. It seems more likely that this will drive more people to skip the vaccine, since they're being told they can't even go back to normal once vaccinated, than anything else.

There's some additional data which indicates Pfizer and Moderna are likely to limit transmission, but from my understanding it's not as ironclad as the symptomatic cases data.

For most trials, no. You have to look at each individual study, but most commonly, they only test after people show specific symptoms.

That said, I'm smarting a bit (even though I understand why) that the fully vaccinated guidelines cover 2 weeks after J&J, while it's looking likely the mRNA vaccines give you better protection even 2 weeks after the first shot. (You really do want the second... the 6-month Moderna study shows you get about 10x the antibodies from the second one, which means the protection lasts much longer if nothing else.)

https://www.vox.com/22311625/covid-19-vaccine-efficacy-johns...

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/02/02/my...

See "Why you can't compare Covid-19 vaccines":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3odScka55A

You're welcome.

The J&J vaccine is marketed as a single-dose vaccine, unlike the others which all require two doses to reach their reported efficacy. Single-dose is a massive advantage which will greatly speed up vaccination progress, especially in developing countries.

And 66% seems pretty good for a single dose.

Such a vaccine would also have two doses and require intense refrigeration which are the primary issues blocking it... additionally many of those jurisdictions might not accept a US vaccine. China, maybe, since they admitted their own vaccines aren't working super well. Russia doesn't have anything wrong with its vaccine but the Kremlin admitted no one is taking it, apparently because they don't believe in covid.

Despite what the press has reported, that's not really what happened. In a conference talk on vaccines, the head of China CDC made a general statement about what to do about "low vaccine efficacy." That's been blown up in the Western media into an "admission" that all Chinese vaccines supposedly have low efficacy.

It doesn't even make sense to talk about the efficacy of "Chinese vaccines." Chinese vaccines run the gamut, from inactivated whole virus to protein subunit to adenovirus vectors. There's even a Chinese partner to Biontech, which is going to manufacture the latter's mRNA vaccine.

Exactly. There should be no place for vaccine profiteering, especially now that we have two extremely good vaccines. But in the interest of pharma profits, instead of cooperatively manufacturing the best vaccines, unburdened by patent hurdles, instead we have massive amounts of public funding going to pharma corps so that they can make profits off this medical crisis. Truly shameless.