> The agency has investigated 13 of the deaths so far and concluded that common adverse reactions of mRNA vaccines, such as fever, nausea, and diarrhoea, may have contributed to fatal outcomes in some of the frail patients.
We have known that the vaccines can cause a strong immune response, is it really unbelievable it can kill very frail patients?
This is a simple trolley problem and it's the same for basically all medications and medical procedures. You either do nothing (don't vaccinate) and lots of people die, or you pull the lever (vaccinate) and maybe a few people die from rare side-effects, but many more are saved by eliminating the virus.
Or, you avoid vaccines for people at high risk of dying from the vaccine. Then you let herd immunity work. The question is what percentage chance do you have of dying from the vaccine versus getting the virus. Unfortunately, that's going to be hard to tell.
We probably are not going to give vaccines to immunocompromised people because the chance of a bad reaction are likely higher than the chance of getting the virus. The people who died are likely now in the category of don't vaccinate.
It is currently uncertain[a,b] if the vaccines prevent the spread of corona, and logically therefore it is unknown if the vaccinations contribute towards herd immunity or not.
Covid19 kills at a rate of 10-20% in that age group. What's the bigger risk to them do you think?
People who can't do math with risks drive me crazy. No offense meant to you, it's just a button I have lately after arguing with my parents about the risks of the vaccine.
Given the prevalence of COVID in all countries (i.e. almost 10% of population of my country were infected already), it is not that low and will only go up exponentially as governments can't hold lockdowns longer. At some point old people will not be able to avoid contracting the virus, and 10-20% of them will die.
You're one of those people. The lowest risk might be to vaccinate the rest of the population, thus stop the spread of COVID and avoid the danger of both COVID and the vaccine for the most vulnerable.
Governments considered this strategy, but the problem with it how many at risk people would die while we wait to have enough vaccine. I believe not a single country is pursuing this strategy.
I don’t know where you are from, but you don’t sign waivers for these things in Norway. There might be backlashes if there is consensus that giving these people the vaccine was incautious. As an example (and without linking the safety of these two vaccines), the Norwegian government has paid about 350 MNOK (about 40 million USD) to people with problems after the Pandemrix vaccine.
That doesn’t really mean that it will affect the ones who made these decisions though. So in that manner, the current government is probably completely safe.
> “We are not alarmed or worried about this, because these are very rare occurrences and they occurred in very frail patients with very serious disease,”
Please don't hype weak claims about vaccine dangers, people.
23 people died. These are the very people we were trying to save, why we shut everything down, right? But I guess we don't feel as strongly about their deaths because it was our vaccine that did it.
It contributed to their deaths in the same way covid contributes to the death of someone with underlying conditions. Or what, will you say that it was the underlying conditions that killed them, and not covid? ;)
Very old people were not part of volunteer group, so this vaccine do have more severe side effects than extrapolated. They are changing the regime and skipping some of the frailest due to this. The vaccine will still provide protection for most.
How do you know it contributed to their death? How would it do so? There are clear ways underlying conditions can contribute to death by covid, but I’m not aware of any such thing with the vaccine.
Also fully Vaccinating is the only good way to end lockdowns. If you dislike lockdowns and want them to end and regular life to resume you should be be happy that we are Vaccinating and not make unsupported accusations
Older people dying is not the only reason for the shutdowns. Health care being overwhelmed is another main reason, and it’s not just old people that end up in hospital.
The 45 - 64 age group has occupied the most hospital beds during the pandemic in my country (Scotland), and probably yours too if you dig out the stats.
The Covid jab is to vaccines what IV saline is to drinking water.
We should be scrutinizing it extensively because it is unproven technology being rolled out at an unprecedented scale for a virus that has an extremely low fatality rate.
In short: if we fuck this up in any way vaccines will become nonviable in the majority of the western world, and with good reason too.
In short: it does not use a weakened version of the virus like every vaccine up till now, it injects mRNA instead. That mRNA gets inside your cells and causes the cells to express a protein that is common to the virus. Other cells react to this by creating anti-bodies against that protein.
It is a misuse of terminology to call it a vaccine given that word has nearly two centuries of meaning, and if some people have a bad reaction to it then it drags down proven technology along with it. It is closer to temporary genetic modification than it is to regular vaccines.
That 95% of the anti-anti-vax crowd I've talked to have no idea about his bodes ill for scientific literacy and will make any possible backlash against it even worse.
> The Covid jab is to vaccines what IV saline is to drinking water.
I don't quite get this comparison. Are you saying the covid "jab" is almost a vaccine but isn't, in that saline is almost tap water (minus minerals/contamination plus 1% NaCl)?
I think he's referring to how when you're really dehydrated, you give people IV saline because it is a much faster uptake. I honestly don't know the mechanism and am not looking up why right this minute, but my inference from his comment is he's claiming the COVID vaccine hits way harder than a normal flu vaccine.
I've already had an anecdotal report from someone who received the vaccine that it 'floored her' for an entire day.
This article will likely get picked up by other media vehicles and sensationalized, but the writing on the link is very sober and very clear that they are just investigating.
I actually liked it a lot and will save this for when people start spreading the "gloom and doom" version of this news that might be coming soon.
The text of the article is more sober, but the title alarms me because I know a lot of people will look no further, and will spread more vaccine paranoia. There's already plenty of that and the press has been chasing clicks.
If you have a group of 10 million people, a certain number of them are statistically likely to die within the next 24 hours, vaccine or not. So a lot of spurious correlations are going to happen with mass vaccination, and many of them are going to end up in headlines. It's already happening[1] and the press is going to be responsible for a non-zero number of deaths from people who don't understand that it's sheer coincidence.
It's good for people to post this information, and then for others to explain its significance or lackthereof.
Self-censorship and other forms of information suppression just inhibit this process of people becoming exposed to different information and thereby better informed.
I agree, when the information is presented in a clear fashion with all the background facts already understood by the reader.
However, when the average person is so easily misled by spurious correlations, you must present these coincidences with a great deal of background to explain why one event followed by another doesn't mean that that event was caused by the previous event. That context is rarely given, leading multitudes of laypeople to wildly misinformed confirmation bias.
If this year has shown anything is that antivaxxers and anti-antivaxxers are just as retarded. Don't know where they breed these people incapable of nuance
This headline is irresponsible. Old people die all the time, lots of people will die shortly after getting the vaccine. Things like car accidents, undiagnosed medical conditions, heart attacks etc.
Here is an actual quote from the article:
“It may be a coincidence, but we aren’t sure,” Steinar Madsen, medical director of the Norwegian Medicines Agency (NOMA), told The BMJ. “There is no certain connection between these deaths and the vaccine.”
From the very next line:
> The agency has investigated 13 of the deaths so far and concluded that common adverse reactions of mRNA vaccines, such as fever, nausea, and diarrhoea, may have contributed to fatal outcomes in some of the frail patients
Like others have noted, this is a nice article in that does a good job of putting things in context without sensationalising.
However, as with many reports on vaccines more generally, I find the lack of 'background' information, which would paint a correct picture and would be otherwise relatively easy to add, to be very irresponsible.
How many people have been vaccinated in that age category? What percentage does 24 patients represent? Are there other vaccines in circulation? Do they have similar adverse-effect rates? Were there similar deaths in unvaccinated people of that age group? How does this compare to deaths from people who contracted coronavirus in the same group?
This is important context. "A person died from the vaccine" vs "0.0000001% death rate from vaccine compared to 0.001% from the disease" may be factually the same information, but sounds like very different news to most people.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 82.5 ms ] threadWe have known that the vaccines can cause a strong immune response, is it really unbelievable it can kill very frail patients?
We probably are not going to give vaccines to immunocompromised people because the chance of a bad reaction are likely higher than the chance of getting the virus. The people who died are likely now in the category of don't vaccinate.
[a]: https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-you-still-spread-covid-19-a...
[b]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/health/covid-vaccine-mask...
People who can't do math with risks drive me crazy. No offense meant to you, it's just a button I have lately after arguing with my parents about the risks of the vaccine.
What is your basis for saying this?
That doesn’t really mean that it will affect the ones who made these decisions though. So in that manner, the current government is probably completely safe.
Often you have to build entire factories to get these kinds of numbers.
It took many months just to restock shelves with toilet paper.
Thankfully. I'd rather not bet my future on people who cut ventilation holes in their masks and claim 5g gives brain cancer.
Anyhow Whenever I get a chance to take a shot I will. Better save then sorry.
Please don't hype weak claims about vaccine dangers, people.
> very frail patients with very serious disease
have gotten the vaccine?
Looking forward to 2021
What makes you think that
We are pretty sure that Covid caused the vast majority of those excess deaths
Also fully Vaccinating is the only good way to end lockdowns. If you dislike lockdowns and want them to end and regular life to resume you should be be happy that we are Vaccinating and not make unsupported accusations
The 45 - 64 age group has occupied the most hospital beds during the pandemic in my country (Scotland), and probably yours too if you dig out the stats.
We should be scrutinizing it extensively because it is unproven technology being rolled out at an unprecedented scale for a virus that has an extremely low fatality rate.
In short: if we fuck this up in any way vaccines will become nonviable in the majority of the western world, and with good reason too.
Edit: since people don't seem to know what the covid jab actually is, but enjoy downvoting and flagging: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...
In short: it does not use a weakened version of the virus like every vaccine up till now, it injects mRNA instead. That mRNA gets inside your cells and causes the cells to express a protein that is common to the virus. Other cells react to this by creating anti-bodies against that protein.
It is a misuse of terminology to call it a vaccine given that word has nearly two centuries of meaning, and if some people have a bad reaction to it then it drags down proven technology along with it. It is closer to temporary genetic modification than it is to regular vaccines.
That 95% of the anti-anti-vax crowd I've talked to have no idea about his bodes ill for scientific literacy and will make any possible backlash against it even worse.
I don't quite get this comparison. Are you saying the covid "jab" is almost a vaccine but isn't, in that saline is almost tap water (minus minerals/contamination plus 1% NaCl)?
I've already had an anecdotal report from someone who received the vaccine that it 'floored her' for an entire day.
I hope this helps your understanding.
That's what a standard vaccine with an attenuated virus does as well.
If any virus did we would all be dead since they completely circumvent the immune system.
And obviously the proteins coded for by such genetic material do stimulate immune response, otherwise mRNA vaccines would have no effect.
I actually liked it a lot and will save this for when people start spreading the "gloom and doom" version of this news that might be coming soon.
If you have a group of 10 million people, a certain number of them are statistically likely to die within the next 24 hours, vaccine or not. So a lot of spurious correlations are going to happen with mass vaccination, and many of them are going to end up in headlines. It's already happening[1] and the press is going to be responsible for a non-zero number of deaths from people who don't understand that it's sheer coincidence.
[1] https://nypost.com/2021/01/13/pfizer-cdc-probing-death-of-fl...
Self-censorship and other forms of information suppression just inhibit this process of people becoming exposed to different information and thereby better informed.
However, when the average person is so easily misled by spurious correlations, you must present these coincidences with a great deal of background to explain why one event followed by another doesn't mean that that event was caused by the previous event. That context is rarely given, leading multitudes of laypeople to wildly misinformed confirmation bias.
- Inject a patient with a vaccine that may kill them.
- Do no harm, treat them if they get sick, mourn them if they die.
Here is an actual quote from the article:
“It may be a coincidence, but we aren’t sure,” Steinar Madsen, medical director of the Norwegian Medicines Agency (NOMA), told The BMJ. “There is no certain connection between these deaths and the vaccine.”
So people die all the time, sometimes is a "tragedy" other a "coincidence"
However, as with many reports on vaccines more generally, I find the lack of 'background' information, which would paint a correct picture and would be otherwise relatively easy to add, to be very irresponsible.
How many people have been vaccinated in that age category? What percentage does 24 patients represent? Are there other vaccines in circulation? Do they have similar adverse-effect rates? Were there similar deaths in unvaccinated people of that age group? How does this compare to deaths from people who contracted coronavirus in the same group?
This is important context. "A person died from the vaccine" vs "0.0000001% death rate from vaccine compared to 0.001% from the disease" may be factually the same information, but sounds like very different news to most people.