Covid-19 #27: A Handful of Stars, A Fistful of Dollars

[Luzifer's right hand]

13 minutes ago, Padraig said:

Geez.  I hope that is not the standard advice!  That would scare the life out of me.

I wonder is there supply issues with Sputnik?  Or do you mean they have the vaccine but are not using it?  I've heard manufacturing enough Sputnik is a big issue given all the countries they are supplying.  Why they are looking at an Italian factory open and operating by June.

But yes, I think we have now got the last of Moderna too till the end of the month, when there is supposed to be a big delivery to get them to their Q1 target.  We'll see.

What did this person do?

Did not tell our health minister that they could have ordered another 100k doses of the Pfizer vaccine. At least that is the story. 

[JoannaL]

Now Germany also suspends use of AZ, also only "precautionary". No idea what to think.

[Which Tyler]

As far as I can tell at his point - there's not even a correlation between AZ and clotting issues, let alone causation.

There's a huge over-abundancd of precaution though, likely political rather than anything else - in the same way that the over-abundancd of precaution over using AZ in the over 60s was largely political (though with a valid "no evidence yet" excuse)

[IheartIheartTesla]

Well, both my over 65 parents already took one of the AZ doses, although they were aware of the clotting concern, weirdly enough (actually not that weird, they keep up to date on most of the COVID stuff).

One of them (and me) is on statins, which we talked about as having beneficial effects on blood clotting which I subsequently found to be true, so maybe there are some mitigating effects present (even if it isnt a real issue).

[Zorral]

We see so much coverage in the media about those who are anti-vaxers, who won't get vaccinated even if they have the opportunity.  But here with us and among all our friends and colleagues, around the country and around the world, none of us know a single person who doesn't want desperately to get vaccinated as soon as possible.

Nor did any of us recognize a single person in the seditionist siege of the Capitol.

Guess that shows what satanists Partner, myself and all our kind are, right? 

Even among the racist supporters in my family, who despise the person now in the Oval office, they are all desperately charging head on to get vaccinated as fast as possible and have whined about not being vaccinated since December.  The ones with kids can't wait for their checks either.

[JoannaL]

58 minutes ago, Which Tyler said:

As far as I can tell at his point - there's not even a correlation between AZ and clotting issues, let alone causation.

There's a huge over-abundancd of precaution though, likely political rather than anything else - in the same way that the over-abundancd of precaution over using AZ in the over 60s was largely political (though with a valid "no evidence yet" excuse)

As far as I know there is not (and hopefully never will be) an established causation between AZ and clotting issues. But there seems to be some correlation at least in Norway and perhaps also in Austria and Denmark. For Germany the Paul Ehrlich Institute which is responsible for vaccination issues looked into the data on the weekend and came to the conclusion that 7 cases of blood clots in the brain is unusual for 1,6 mio vaccinations and that they need to look into it more closely. so they advised the health minister about this and he suspended AZ precautionary. There is nothing political about this; actually from a political point of view this is a disaster. AZ had problems here, and the number of people who will take it will  shrink now further, even if it is cleared.

[IheartIheartTesla]

I havent checked the math here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/15/evidence-oxford-vaccine-blood-clots-data-causal-links

But the counter-claim is:

Quote

We can try a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation. Deep vein thromboses (DVTs) happen to around one person per 1,000 each year, and probably more in the older population being vaccinated. Working on the basis of these figures, out of 5 million people getting vaccinated, we would expect significantly more than 5,000 DVTs a year, or at least 100 every week. So it is not at all surprising that there have been 30 reports.

7 in 1.6 million is a little smaller than 30 in 5 million, so who knows? I do know a little bit of statistics but am not as versed in vaccines/immunology so will wait to see how all the analysis pans out.

[RhaenysBee]

6 hours ago, Padraig said:

Geez.  I hope that is not the standard advice!  That would scare the life out of me.

I wonder is there supply issues with Sputnik?  Or do you mean they have the vaccine but are not using it?  I've heard manufacturing enough Sputnik is a big issue given all the countries they are supplying.  Why they are looking at an Italian factory open and operating by June.

I don’t know why that’s the first thing they said. Three different GPs I talked to gave roughly the same advice and that was to drink lots of water, take vitamin C and D, air the room frequently, stay lightly active if able and call an ambulance if there’s difficulty breathing or a persistent 39+C fever that doesn’t respond to medicine and cooling. They didn’t say anything about the clotting. 

I’m not sure, we got an initial supply (no idea how many doses) and they vaccinated with Sputnik for two weeks, then they seem to have stopped and are mainly administering AZ and Shinopharm. Maybe stock issue, maybe administration (there was a big admin fiasco with AZ at some point too when they sent out a lot of faulty notifications), I don’t know. 

[Fragile Bird]

I just read my WaPo email reports, and there’s a story about Facebook doing a deep dive into posts that they call “vaccine hesitant”. FB has been putting warnings on posts that contain false information, but the question is, what to do about posts from people reporting side effects and concerns about vaccine reactions, and other things that are not outright untruths.

They tag these posts as “VH” by their algorithm software. Their data scientists divided US users, groups and pages into 638 population segments, to explore which types of groups hold vaccine hesitant beliefs. These groups could have at least 3 M people in them. Just 10 out of the 638 contain 50% of all vaccine hesitancy content on FB. And in those groups, just 111 users contributed half of all VH content.

They also discovered significant overlap with those associated with QAnon and VH posts.

[JoannaL]

8 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

I havent checked the math here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/15/evidence-oxford-vaccine-blood-clots-data-causal-links

But the counter-claim is:

7 in 1.6 million is a little smaller than 30 in 5 million, so who knows? I do know a little bit of statistics but am not as versed in vaccines/immunology so will wait to see how all the analysis pans out.

I just hope the article is right, but there maybe  a difference between DVT and blood clots in the brain and how often they happen? I am no expert and we all have to wait for the investigation, but there must be some correlation or the experts wouldnt have recommended a halt.

[Zorral]

What takes to get a vaccine into our arms:

https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-medicine/why-covid-19-vaccines-arent-yet-available-to-everyone

As just one bit of the engineering nightmare this has been --

s just one bit --

Quote

....Both the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccine candidates require rare ingredients that are in short supply, such as the lipids used to encase the mRNA and the enzymes used to transcribe it. Calitri, meanwhile, had been grappling with a series of engineering puzzles. “There’s a step in which the mRNA is coated with these lipids, and it’s done in a specialized mixer,” he told me. “The mixers we were using to develop the process are very small”—about the size of a silver dollar. His team didn’t have time to design a larger mixer, so they tied together a hundred of the silver dollars. When the filters on some of the filling equipment needed to be replaced, switching to a different filter was not an option, because any adjustment to the process would have to be approved by the F.D.A. Instead, the team had to learn how to “regenerate” the ones they had. It took six months and numerous prototypes to figure out how to store and ship a frozen product that needed to be kept at subzero temperatures. There were some misses, too. They thought the vaccine would need to be frozen as soon as it came off the filling line, so they installed blast freezers; the data have since shown such precautions to be unnecessary. “We needed to have options,” Calitri explained....

 

[Padraig]

1 hour ago, Which Tyler said:

There's a huge over-abundancd of precaution though, likely political rather than anything else - in the same way that the over-abundancd of precaution over using AZ in the over 60s was largely political (though with a valid "no evidence yet" excuse)

What Joanna said.  How is this decision in any "political"?  Or the over 60's decision also?

I do wonder about the origin of some of these ideas.  Could those sources be biased in any way?

31 minutes ago, IheartIheartTesla said:

7 in 1.6 million is a little smaller than 30 in 5 million, so who knows? I do know a little bit of statistics but am not as versed in vaccines/immunology so will wait to see how all the analysis pans out.

The Guardian is trying to convince the masses that AZ is ok.  And it probably is.  But the article doesn't have enough details on what has actually happened with these cases to be 100% sure that it is ok.  They'd need to know the age and general health of the person's affected (for example).  It actually concludes with this...

Quote

Perhaps we can just hope for some basic humility before claiming we know why something has happened.

All the medical authorities have said that (AFAICT) this decision is strictly precautional.  They don't expect there to be an issue.  But being humble, they want to be very close to 100% sure before they allow millions more to take this vaccine.  Something unusual does seem to have happened (which is correlated with AZ use).  I'd trust the Norwegian (and German) experts in that sense.  It probably is a very weird coincidence but I'm happy for the experts to do their due diligence.

Without making it a conspiracy theory.

28 minutes ago, RhaenysBee said:

 Three different GPs I talked to gave roughly the same advice and that was to drink lots of water, take vitamin C and D, air the room frequently, stay lightly active if able and call an ambulance if there’s difficulty breathing or a persistent 39+C fever that doesn’t respond to medicine and cooling. They didn’t say anything about the clotting. 

I'm glad about that part anyhow.

[ljkeane]

3 minutes ago, Padraig said:

How is this decision in any "political"? 

Well for a start it's not the national bodies that are supposed to be making these decisions in the EU. It's the EMA. That they're undermining what should be the process for making these decisions seems at least somewhat politically influenced.

5 minutes ago, Padraig said:

All the medical authorities have said that (AFAICT) this decision is strictly precautional.  They don't expect there to be an issue.  But being humble, they want to be very close to 100% sure before they allow millions more to take this vaccine.  Something unusual does seem to have happened (which is correlated with AZ use).  I'd trust the Norwegian (and German) experts in that sense.  It probably is a very weird coincidence but I'm happy for the experts to do their due diligence.

The problem here is that the experts clearly don't agree. The WHO, MHRA and, so far at least, the EMA are all pretty strongly endorsing the continued use of the Astrazeneca vaccine. I've seen a number of individual experts today who pretty vehemently think these steps are an absolutely terrible idea.

Delaying vaccinations is not a neutral act here. It's pretty definitely going to result in some people dying. Possibly a large number of people dying with outbreaks trending upwards in a number of European countries and the risks of fueling vaccine hesitancy. If it turns out it's being done on a flimsy basis (which a number of experts are arguing is the case) there should be a lot of heads on the chopping block.

[Derfel Cadarn]

People need to be aware that a lot of people , particularly the old and medically vulnerable, are getting these vaccines. Many will perhaps die in the near future, but panickong over the vaccine is counterproductive unless there’s something tangible to suggest something’s amiss.

There’s a whole population out there that’s been largely sitting on their backside eating junk and drinking booze, freaked out by the pandemic. There might very well be a spike in liver/kidney/heart issues, but blaming it all on the vaccines is jumping the gun

[Heartofice]

In an atmosphere of surprisingly high anti vaccine sentiment it seems like everything is being done to make people terrified of vaccines. 

[Zorral]

21 minutes ago, Derfel Cadarn said:

There’s a whole population out there that’s been largely sitting on their backside eating junk and drinking booze, freaked out by the pandemic.

Is that really true? I mean, even my obese sister and husband have lost weight and gained muscle tone over this year of being kept at home.

Everybody I know has been working their butts off one way and another, which, has for many included working as hard and fast as they can, to master new skills, that will carry into the post pandemic world, whatever it might be.  And around here it's clear the people I don't know personally have been keeping up fitness and nutritional routines all along -- they look really good, revealed in the sunshine and warm weather we had for about three days last week (alas, today, it's wintery cold as heck, temperature and wind-wise, despite the sun).  But then, we're living among the privileged, for sure!

[Raja]

1 hour ago, ljkeane said:

Delaying vaccinations is not a neutral act here. It's pretty definitely going to result in some people dying. Possibly a large number of people dying with outbreaks trending upwards in a number of European countries and the risks of fueling vaccine hesitancy. If it turns out it's being done on a flimsy basis (which a number of experts are arguing is the case) there should be a lot of heads on the chopping block.

The EMA have already released a statement here regarding looking at the data and making an announcement in 3 days, on the 18th regarding any further actions, their current statement is this

Quote

EMA’s investigation has been continuing over the weekend, and rigorous analysis of all the data related to thromboembolic events will be carried out in the coming days. Experts are looking in great detail at all the available data and clinical circumstances surrounding specific cases to determine whether the vaccine might have contributed or if the event is likely to have been due to other causes. EMA’s safety committee (PRAC) will further review the information tomorrow (Tuesday) and has called an extraordinary meeting on Thursday 18 March to conclude on the information gathered and any further actions that may need to be taken.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis, with devastating health, social and economic impact, and continues to be a major burden on EU health systems. Vaccines for COVID-19 help to protect individuals from becoming ill, especially healthcare professionals and vulnerable populations, such as older people or those with chronic diseases. While its investigation is ongoing, EMA currently remains of the view that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in preventing COVID-19, with its associated risk of hospitalisation and death, outweigh the risks of side effects.

You can say 'fueling vaccine hesitancy' but we need to be transparent in what we do with regards to pharmacovigilence data, it would be worse if we people didn't look into this and then later down the road we found out it increases the risk of clots in a certain subset of people. How do you think 'vaccine hesitancy' would be then? I

In Norway, it sounds like there was a cluster of blood clots in younger people that received the vaccine, and that prompted a pause and analysis of the data ( which is totally normal and is done for every other medical intervention), a few countries in the EU have also followed by pausing vaccinations for a few days.

I'm sure you will find people that say it is being done for flimsy reasons but this is something we do in literally every medical intervention if there is a signal of harm.

As for the delay, if it were a months long delay, then sure, but we're talking about days here and government bodies doing the due diligence required of them is something I'm not going to complain about, and I say this as someone who has had the AstraZeneca vaccine and has worked through two covid waves here in the UK.

[ljkeane]

9 minutes ago, Raja said:

The EMA have already released a statement here regarding looking at the data and making an announcement in 3 days, on the 18th regarding any further actions, their current statement is this

You can say 'fueling vaccine hesitancy' but we need to be transparent in what we do with regards to pharmacovigilence data, it would be worse if we people didn't look into this and then later down the road we found out it increases the risk of clots in a certain subset of people. How do you think 'vaccine hesitancy' would be then?

Who's saying not to look into this or not to be transparent about it? That's clearly what the EMA are doing. That various countries in the EU are undermining the EMA process is what's concerning. If you don't think this is going to undermine already fragile confidence in covid vaccinations in the EU and the AZ vaccine in particular I don't know what to tell you.

 

[Raja]

4 minutes ago, ljkeane said:

If you don't think this is going to undermine already fragile confidence in covid vaccinations in the EU and the AZ vaccine in particular I don't know what to tell you.

The various countries pausing the vaccination is understandable given the cluster in Norway until they hear from the EMA in literally 3 days.

[Filippa Eilhart]

1 hour ago, ljkeane said:

Delaying vaccinations is not a neutral act here. It's pretty definitely going to result in some people dying. Possibly a large number of people dying with outbreaks trending upwards in a number of European countries and the risks of fueling vaccine hesitancy. If it turns out it's being done on a flimsy basis (which a number of experts are arguing is the case) there should be a lot of heads on the chopping block.

it’s not like countries have millions of AZ vaccines sitting unused. Like I said before, when Luxembourg paused vaccinations, 86% of the batch was already distributed. The amount they put on hold is 60 vials. Countries are not getting enough AZ vaccines for this short pause to make much of a difference in a grand scheme of things.