I think 'Trust the soyence bro' and labeling anything negative about vaccines a conspiracy theory is probably what convinces people on the fence to become anti vaxxers.
How else would you describe it, would "spreading FUD" be more appropriate/neutral?
By debunking I don't mean labeling them negatively but fact-checking the claims and showing reasonable people on the fence provable evidence to help them think for themselves based on facts and not just to blindly believe the sensationalist rumors.
And although it's not relevant, the whole vaccine passport thing is turning me against it. I don't see why everybody should be required to have something injected into their body to live their lives as normal, especially given that not everybody needs to have it for the virus to fizzle out. This strong-arming should be enough to make anyone suspicious.
Taxes are payments that a citizen is morally and legally obliged to pay the state for upkeep and services. Not paying taxes is essentially stealing from others.
There is no moral or legal obligation to have a vaccine. Choosing to not have a vaccine is not stealing from anyone else. It does not reduce the effectiveness of their vaccination.
In fact, a large chunk of people could choose not to be vaccinated and we will still crush COVID-19. They should have the choice - why should everyone be strong-armed into having it if it's not necessary and they're not comfortable with it?
But I do wonder how the vaccine requirement will play out, Texas for instance does not force the vaccine upon it's population, which i think is the right way to go about it.
The Malaria vaccine was one i skipped due to side effects and i think you should have a similar free choice for the Corona vaccine.
You should have the right to refuse a vaccine and the rest of us should have the right to not associate with people who have decided to put the rest of us at risk. If only we had some way to easily let people know to which group you belong...
How is refusing a vaccine putting anyone else at risk if the people around them are vaccinated? The popular vaccines are highly efficacious and enough to make herd immunity kick in.
I don't know how I can make you see that it is precisely this kind of talk that's scaring regular people into being anti-vax.
This is a classic free rider situation where the cost for the rest of us is a continuation of a deadly and costly pandemic. That is the wonderful thing about vaccine passports, you can be as anti-vax as you want and the rest of us can shun you without concern. Sounds like win-win unless you think you should have some right to free ride the risks the rest of us are accepting...
It's not as clear cut as that. Vaccines are not foolproof, and there have been complications in the past. As another commenter points out, people would rather their death by an accidental than as a result of deliberate action.
And vaccine passports give people the right to choose not to vaccinate and avoid what they see as a risk from the vaccine. What these free riders object to is the fact that they can no longer hide and externalise the risk they are trying to force onto the rest of us.
You have the right to choose who you associate with, you do not have the right to force the rest of us to accept your company or society. There is a free choice, you just want the benefits of society without paying the freight and expect the rest of us to put up with it.
It's coercion into taking a rushed vaccine that hasn't undergone long term testing, and for which vaccine manufacturers are off the hook in terms of liability (in the UK at least).
It's against the Nuremberg code.
Just like with flu vaccines every year, once the high risk groups are vaccinated there is no need for the rest of society to take these vaccines.
No one is forcing _anyone_ into subjecting themselves to experimentation. You have the choice to opt out of social situations where your presence is a danger to others and where those people would like the option to exclude your presence due to your free choice to remain a likely disease vector.
You DO NOT have some right to impose yourself on the rest of us. We do not have any requirement to associate with you or to tolerate your presence. If you represent a risk then we have the right to exclude you if we think you are choosing this path to be a free rider rather than due to some medical necessity. I would say that the amount of self-declared selfishness here is shocking, but if we have learned anything over the past few years it is that a sizeable fraction of our society is composed of people who are best avoided if possible.
Yes, but please don't forget that some people cannot take the vaccine, or will have the vaccine but not develop antibodies.
We need to encourage as many people to be vaccinated as possible in order to help protect this other group. And we need to avoid causing even more harm to this group by excluding them from society.
No one is strong arming me. I received all vaccines that were available in my youth and my child received all as well. I am booked for vaccination next week here in the UK and I don't care which one I get. It'll probably be AZ. There are concerns of course but this is the same with any other medication/vaccine taken. You never know how your body will respond.
Vaccine 'passports' are nothing new. We kind of all have them already. If you travel to some parts of Africa you already need a proof of vaccination (yellow fever). How is Covid-19 any different? It's here now, there's little we can do apart from all of us getting vaccinated and slowly getting back to normal lives. I just wish the whole world would get vaccinated at the same time.
You're playing straight into the hands of real conspiracy theorists with this kind of reaction. This is just reporting on very basic facts coming directly from the UK government:
Sorry, didn't mean to but as I've said above in the thread just the other day I've seen on Facebook a pretty elaborate FUD/conspiracy theory being endorsed by a former religiously active colleague.
It was linking AZ trial side effects with apocalyptic prophecies and DoD involvement in designing a virus targeting middle eastern religious fundamentalists.
My point was that there should be a way to debunk these with fact-based evidence for people willing to reason from facts or at least to raise a few question marks on their assumptions.
That's what they indeed reported in the UK because the number of blood clots allegedly caused by the vaccine is, according to what they reported, lower than would be expected in the general population.
No, the risk according to this topic is increased compared to standard rate of blood clots. (The parent comment wording was basically "wrong", meaning- giving off a false impression.)
Funnily enough, that would actually also be a warning sign. It needs to be not significantly different. Otherwise it means that the vaccine is interfering with blood coagulation, which is not what it's meant to do
You mean higher? This is not about "normal" blood clots. This is about cerebral venous sinus thrombosis, sometimes in conjunction with thrombocytopenia.
In Germany incidence of CVST is around .3-.5/100,000 per year. (Higher in women under 50; some undiagnosed cases probably notwithstanding)
Vaxzevira (the A-Z vaccine) has been in use for less than 3 months, ~2.2M doses have been given, resulting in 31 cases. So, worst case, you would have expected around 5 cases at this time.
(Edit: changed acronym to English version, instead of the German one)
Does this comparison account for the vaccinations being administered to specific populations? In the UK it's been targeted at the most vulnerable & elderly.
Historical trends don't factor in the past 12m stay-at and work-from home spike, and related spike in sedentary living.
Your natural incidence rate is whole-population but the vaccine rollout has been weighted to the oldest and least healthy. These may be the population that most of those cases happened in otherwise.
You can assuage some of these things by looking at other vaccines, assuming they're given to the same demographics.
The argument that the number of deaths in the US greater than the baseline from the previous year is roughly the same as the reported deaths where there was a covid infection, so our count seems accurate?
The argument is that the numbers should be reported properly - with their context and baseline. For COVID cases in general, it can, it should and it is being applied in many statistics. It is an important number for understanding the disease.
If I got the vaccine and a blood clot, I'd want to understand it better. I'd want to understand the numbers at large to see whether it was caused by the vaccine. In the UK, the numbers need to be considered fully:
* 30 million have received the first
* 4 million have received the second
Let's assume that 80% of folk got the AZ vaccine and that there's an equal chance of clot after each vaccine. So we're stating that the chance is 42 / 34 * e6 * 0.8. That means that the chance of it happening (from just those numbers) is 0.000001544117647. Since there are some many zeros, 0.000_001_544_117647. These numbers are tiny.
Now compare that with the chance of death from Covid. For over 50 the chance of death is much higher (calculated by UK population number and deaths in population over over 50 from COVID). When I did the calcs yesterday on the Norwegian (iirc) numbers assuming about 30 per million (higher ratio than the UK numbers), it seemed that for the under 40's the chance of death from vaccine was slightly lower than dying from COVID.
In the UK, COVID deaths might be considered higher than other countries due to differences in the way in which deaths are recorded.
The next question to ask is what the likelihood of a similar blood clot within the general population if they'd not had the vaccine. From what I hear those chances are similarly low. From what I've read from doctors it sounds like the chances are higher than without the vaccine. Some joked that this could therefore be considered an anti-blood clotting medicine.
Next put this into comparison with other medications, such as the contraceptive pill where chance of blots clots is 1:1000.
My point is treating humans like numbers is not a way to get people to overcome a fear that this shot can potentially have a life threatening blood clot or other undocumented adverse effects being it’s so new.
The numbers at large only matter when you’re the one who lands on the other side of fence without harm.
Now, This wouldn’t be an issue if the world wasn’t moving to require a vaccination certificate since that person can make the choice themselves to balance the risk of the shot vs the adverse effects.
But it’s becoming increasingly real that they risk being a second class citizen. It’s just plain wrong and completely anti freedom.
Covid has been in the US for about a year and killed over 500 000 people so we can approximate that to be about 500 000 in a year. The top 3 leading causes of death in the US in 2017 were heart disease (635 260), cancer (598 038), and accidents (161 374) [0]. That puts covid solidly in third place even if you assume the covid numbers are over counted. Heart disease and cancer accounted for over 20% of deaths each so that would make covid somewhere a little under 20% of deaths. Based on that, nearly 1 in 5 people who died in the last year in the US died of covid.
Some observations just from watching the news reports about AZ, especially here in Germany:
- over 30 cases were observed, that is statistically higher than expected, that would have been less than 5.
- all cases were below 55, very few men
- due to the approval process in EU, AZ wasn't approved for people over 65 until very recently, as the initial approval didn't contain the necessary data in this age group. As a consequence, AZ was used for young people that qualified for a vaccination, e.g. health workers, teachers. Other than these groups, general vaccination only happened above 70 for the scarcity of vaccine.
- As AZ is now approved for any age group, last week the vaccination plan was altered, AZ is now used only for people over 60, everyone else gets other vaccines (mostly BioNTech)
- the UK always used AZ for all age groups, starting with the oldest. Currently people down to the age 50. So the majority of the vaccinated people in the UK was above the age group in which the cases had been observed in the EU.
>No, the EMA was perfectly happy with giving it to people over 65, it was the local health authorities who wanted to "have their say" and nitpicked it.
Why are you framing the event of AZ doing a bad job at their trails and submitted literally bad data, and tried to mix it up with different data, as being the authorities "having their say"? It wasn't just one local health authority, it was even health authorities that has no influence from EMA, like Switzerland. At best your critic would be... they are rigorous and extremely demanding about these subjects?
Maybe, just maybe, a large pharmaceutical that got hundreds of millions in funding simply shouldn't fuck up trials?
I'm not arguing that the AZ trials weren't messy, but the EMA also based their decision on antibody titers of the older cohorts (and on initial UK real use data if I'm not mistaken).
> they are rigorous and extremely demanding about these subjects?
While the older cohort is the one that suffers the most Covid causalities? MHRA thought it was a "risk" worth taking no? (because in the end it wasn't risky - maybe a slight smaller efficiency but that's it)
> Maybe, just maybe
Oh there's no maybe there, their trials were a mess, hence why the FDA asked for another trial.
” A possible concern is what’s being called vaccine-induced prothrombotic immune thrombocytopenia (VIPIT) by Andreas Greinacher at Univ. Griefswald. This is a blood clotting syndrome that’s similar to what’s observed with the (already known) syndrome of heparin-induced thrombocytopenia. That problem, first over 40 years ago, is a paradoxical effect that occurs in a few people of administering heparin for blood clotting problems and actually making the situation worse.”
I’ve seen some comments here saying this is one in a million. Here’s the thing: while that may be statistically true, it’s not an argument to convince people to take the shot. You can’t tell folks “hey, listen, there’s a very slight chance you’re gonna die, but don’t you worry - mathematics is on your side”. It looks like a lottery nobody wants to play. People don’t care about mathematics. Mathematics didn’t make sense in school, it sure not gonna make sense in their life-or-death situation. Ironically, this is the kind of irrational thinking that needlessly exposes the very same people to the virus. The difference is the virus is an accident, while the antivirus is a choice, so I guess they’re essentially saying “I’d rather my death was an accident not my deliberate choice”.
I don’t blame people, though. A friend of mine did the AZ shot recently. The next day he had chest pains and palpitations so severe he thought he was going to have a heart attack. He has a heart disease, but the doctor said the vaccine was safe, and he trusts doctors. Now he’s sh!t scared to take the second dose. The doctor says he’s gonna do fine, and he can’t get tested to see if it’s safe. The vaccine is the test. Should I tell him about statistics? I’d be heartless if I did. He’s well aware of the numbers, but the fear of death (or the desire to live) win against mathematics.
Because you sound like all the anti-vaxxers on Facebook. ”I know science says it’s safe, but here’s an emotion-inducing anecdote that makes you second-guess things”
It’s nothing like that. I’m simply stating a sciency argument won’t work to the masses. As far as the “emotion-inducing anecdote” is concerned, I’m only telling that story to remind that mathematics does more harm where a hug is more appropriate.
I for one don’t think your post is worth a downvote, you represent a legitimate train of thought, maybe even for a lot of people. Risk compared with your own health is surely a different “calculation” then if it’s someone else.
My own thoughts about it (rational or not) is that mRNA is more KISS -just the key protein- which is favourable in complex systems. It’s not that AZ isn’t safe, Pfizer/Moderna just seem safer at this point.
But you need to differentiate this by age group.
Chance of dying of Covid is not 100x to 1000x times higher for the age group affected by the CVT so I can understand every caution here. Its not correct to compare/mix the different age groups from my POV.
In the UK people have no problem with taking the AZ vaccine.
Having an AZ injection is probably the safest thing people will do that day and will then massively decrease risk of covid complications. That's how it should be framed, IMHO, instead of scaring people with the very small chance that something might possibly go wrong (which is lower than the chance of having an accident on the way to the injection).
Here in RO, as far as I can tell, it seems everyone knows someone (or knows someone who knows someone) who did the AZ vaccine and had a scary reaction. Not one to make the news, but scary enough to look for the alternatives (Pfizer and Moderna) or simply postpone vaccination.
How much of that is just confirmation bias? The AZ vaccine isn't approved where I live (USA), but I know plenty of people who have had scary reactions to the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The scary reactions are apparently proof that the vaccine is working as expected on your immune system, but that's small consolation when you're puking your guts out and suffering from dehydration.
See, this is what I’m talking about: the idea that masses would think differently if they learned about and understood irrational beliefs, cognitive biases, statistics etc. is confirmation bias.
Also from RO, and the other day I saw on FB a former colleague with stronger religious beliefs shared a conspiracy theory. It was pretty elaborate, linking someone who had psychological trouble after being in the AZ vaccine trials with the number of the beast, Nephalem and other apocalyptic prophecies, as well as something about an apparent DoD leak from 2005 claiming to engineer a virus that blocked a gene manifesting in loss of religious beliefs that would be targeted at middle eastern fundamentalists.
I tried hard to debunk it but took me a lot of time and not sure if anyone reasoned with my explanation more than with it.
The chance of a car accident is quite higher than the probability of vaccine complications...
It's simply not reasonable to worry about covid vaccines in general and AZ specifically. Unfortunately it seems that there is a lot of scaremongering in the EU.
What is your alternative approach? To not tell people the truth? Because the truth is that almost any cure or vaccine or medicine in general has side effects. The thing is that the incidence is very low, which gives better overall probability of health given the chances of deaths from COVID, and that's why we think vaccines are a good idea, for example.
> Should I tell him about statistics? I’d be heartless if I did.
What?? That's the only actually truthful and objective information you can give to him. How is that "heartless"? You don't need to tell him that in a cold voice and never acknowledge his fears and feelings, you can discuss all that and make him feel better somehow.
But telling someone truthful information - is not heartless, it's one of the best things you can do for them.
Again the British media did a disservice to the vaccination effort, after weeks of bashing several regulators for making the decision of investigating this anomaly, and never once questioned the possibility that maybe it wasn't yet expressed in the UK data because their own regulator missed these cases.
One thing is to bash the EU politicians because that's kind of what they are there for, other thing is to bash health authorities, regulators, doctors and scientists out of some sick sense of nationalism and superiority.
It's just sad.
Norway, Germany, Denmark and other countries regulator bodies worked together to identify the anomaly, what triggers it, and how to deal with it, and this will prevent unnecessary deaths of people that are committed to help stop this pandemic by taking a vaccine.
That's how these agencies should work, that's why everyone should be relieved about taking a vaccine - they didn't create new protocols, or closed their eyes, or bent over politics, just because this vaccine effort is important. They know what they are doing, and questioning them out of arrogance it's just an expression of ignorance.
Today Eudra Vigilance database will contain numbers for this week. Last week there were 59 cases of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (the week before 31 the week before 7), 14 died, only 3 recovered so far. 45 women, 14 men almost all 18-64 years.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadHow many deaths were caused by the AZ and other vaccines so far and how does that compare with the mortality rate of the disease?
Is there any website that is gathering and debunking these conspiracy theories?
By debunking I don't mean labeling them negatively but fact-checking the claims and showing reasonable people on the fence provable evidence to help them think for themselves based on facts and not just to blindly believe the sensationalist rumors.
Taxes are payments that a citizen is morally and legally obliged to pay the state for upkeep and services. Not paying taxes is essentially stealing from others.
There is no moral or legal obligation to have a vaccine. Choosing to not have a vaccine is not stealing from anyone else. It does not reduce the effectiveness of their vaccination.
In fact, a large chunk of people could choose not to be vaccinated and we will still crush COVID-19. They should have the choice - why should everyone be strong-armed into having it if it's not necessary and they're not comfortable with it?
But I do wonder how the vaccine requirement will play out, Texas for instance does not force the vaccine upon it's population, which i think is the right way to go about it.
The Malaria vaccine was one i skipped due to side effects and i think you should have a similar free choice for the Corona vaccine.
I don't know how I can make you see that it is precisely this kind of talk that's scaring regular people into being anti-vax.
It's against the Nuremberg code.
Just like with flu vaccines every year, once the high risk groups are vaccinated there is no need for the rest of society to take these vaccines.
You DO NOT have some right to impose yourself on the rest of us. We do not have any requirement to associate with you or to tolerate your presence. If you represent a risk then we have the right to exclude you if we think you are choosing this path to be a free rider rather than due to some medical necessity. I would say that the amount of self-declared selfishness here is shocking, but if we have learned anything over the past few years it is that a sizeable fraction of our society is composed of people who are best avoided if possible.
We need to encourage as many people to be vaccinated as possible in order to help protect this other group. And we need to avoid causing even more harm to this group by excluding them from society.
Vaccine 'passports' are nothing new. We kind of all have them already. If you travel to some parts of Africa you already need a proof of vaccination (yellow fever). How is Covid-19 any different? It's here now, there's little we can do apart from all of us getting vaccinated and slowly getting back to normal lives. I just wish the whole world would get vaccinated at the same time.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...
It was linking AZ trial side effects with apocalyptic prophecies and DoD involvement in designing a virus targeting middle eastern religious fundamentalists.
My point was that there should be a way to debunk these with fact-based evidence for people willing to reason from facts or at least to raise a few question marks on their assumptions.
Vaxzevira (the A-Z vaccine) has been in use for less than 3 months, ~2.2M doses have been given, resulting in 31 cases. So, worst case, you would have expected around 5 cases at this time.
(Edit: changed acronym to English version, instead of the German one)
Your natural incidence rate is whole-population but the vaccine rollout has been weighted to the oldest and least healthy. These may be the population that most of those cases happened in otherwise.
You can assuage some of these things by looking at other vaccines, assuming they're given to the same demographics.
No need to be snarky.
In 2017 there were almost 80k deaths in the US due to flu.
In 2018 around 40k.
Yes currently its being reported that there has been nearly 500k deaths due to covid only. Note the only part.
I smell number fuckery here...
More people have died from Covid-19 than in the past 5 flu seasons combined
And that was October
45s into this video shows icu admissions each year for flu and covid. Covid of course coming with stringent lockdowns.
https://www.ft.com/video/0cd6f9f9-664e-40f9-bad4-dde59d7c746...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHfOcGm5xiA
This shows overall deaths in a number of countries compared to the last 20 years for a number of countries.
https://oronu.wordpress.com/2021/01/29/mortality-statistics/
* 30 million have received the first
* 4 million have received the second
Let's assume that 80% of folk got the AZ vaccine and that there's an equal chance of clot after each vaccine. So we're stating that the chance is 42 / 34 * e6 * 0.8. That means that the chance of it happening (from just those numbers) is 0.000001544117647. Since there are some many zeros, 0.000_001_544_117647. These numbers are tiny.
Now compare that with the chance of death from Covid. For over 50 the chance of death is much higher (calculated by UK population number and deaths in population over over 50 from COVID). When I did the calcs yesterday on the Norwegian (iirc) numbers assuming about 30 per million (higher ratio than the UK numbers), it seemed that for the under 40's the chance of death from vaccine was slightly lower than dying from COVID.
In the UK, COVID deaths might be considered higher than other countries due to differences in the way in which deaths are recorded.
The next question to ask is what the likelihood of a similar blood clot within the general population if they'd not had the vaccine. From what I hear those chances are similarly low. From what I've read from doctors it sounds like the chances are higher than without the vaccine. Some joked that this could therefore be considered an anti-blood clotting medicine.
Next put this into comparison with other medications, such as the contraceptive pill where chance of blots clots is 1:1000.
The numbers at large matter.
The numbers at large only matter when you’re the one who lands on the other side of fence without harm.
Now, This wouldn’t be an issue if the world wasn’t moving to require a vaccination certificate since that person can make the choice themselves to balance the risk of the shot vs the adverse effects.
But it’s becoming increasingly real that they risk being a second class citizen. It’s just plain wrong and completely anti freedom.
[0] https://www.healthline.com/health/leading-causes-of-death
- over 30 cases were observed, that is statistically higher than expected, that would have been less than 5.
- all cases were below 55, very few men
- due to the approval process in EU, AZ wasn't approved for people over 65 until very recently, as the initial approval didn't contain the necessary data in this age group. As a consequence, AZ was used for young people that qualified for a vaccination, e.g. health workers, teachers. Other than these groups, general vaccination only happened above 70 for the scarcity of vaccine.
- As AZ is now approved for any age group, last week the vaccination plan was altered, AZ is now used only for people over 60, everyone else gets other vaccines (mostly BioNTech)
- the UK always used AZ for all age groups, starting with the oldest. Currently people down to the age 50. So the majority of the vaccinated people in the UK was above the age group in which the cases had been observed in the EU.
No, the EMA was perfectly happy with giving it to people over 65, it was the local health authorities who wanted to "have their say" and nitpicked it.
Now look and behold, it seems it maybe was a better idea to keep it to the older cohorts.
And yes, the fact that the UK went to the older cohorts first might explain why they have seen fewer cases.
Why are you framing the event of AZ doing a bad job at their trails and submitted literally bad data, and tried to mix it up with different data, as being the authorities "having their say"? It wasn't just one local health authority, it was even health authorities that has no influence from EMA, like Switzerland. At best your critic would be... they are rigorous and extremely demanding about these subjects?
Maybe, just maybe, a large pharmaceutical that got hundreds of millions in funding simply shouldn't fuck up trials?
> they are rigorous and extremely demanding about these subjects?
While the older cohort is the one that suffers the most Covid causalities? MHRA thought it was a "risk" worth taking no? (because in the end it wasn't risky - maybe a slight smaller efficiency but that's it)
> Maybe, just maybe
Oh there's no maybe there, their trials were a mess, hence why the FDA asked for another trial.
https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/03/30/bl...
” A possible concern is what’s being called vaccine-induced prothrombotic immune thrombocytopenia (VIPIT) by Andreas Greinacher at Univ. Griefswald. This is a blood clotting syndrome that’s similar to what’s observed with the (already known) syndrome of heparin-induced thrombocytopenia. That problem, first over 40 years ago, is a paradoxical effect that occurs in a few people of administering heparin for blood clotting problems and actually making the situation worse.”
I don’t blame people, though. A friend of mine did the AZ shot recently. The next day he had chest pains and palpitations so severe he thought he was going to have a heart attack. He has a heart disease, but the doctor said the vaccine was safe, and he trusts doctors. Now he’s sh!t scared to take the second dose. The doctor says he’s gonna do fine, and he can’t get tested to see if it’s safe. The vaccine is the test. Should I tell him about statistics? I’d be heartless if I did. He’s well aware of the numbers, but the fear of death (or the desire to live) win against mathematics.
My own thoughts about it (rational or not) is that mRNA is more KISS -just the key protein- which is favourable in complex systems. It’s not that AZ isn’t safe, Pfizer/Moderna just seem safer at this point.
Things that cause more blood clots than the Covid vaccine: covid itself, pregnancy, birth control, etc
But you prefer the virus, sure, go ahead. But a tube down your throat is not comfortable.
Having an AZ injection is probably the safest thing people will do that day and will then massively decrease risk of covid complications. That's how it should be framed, IMHO, instead of scaring people with the very small chance that something might possibly go wrong (which is lower than the chance of having an accident on the way to the injection).
I tried hard to debunk it but took me a lot of time and not sure if anyone reasoned with my explanation more than with it.
That number also ignores effects of long covid
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/apr/01/long-covid-s...
It's simply not reasonable to worry about covid vaccines in general and AZ specifically. Unfortunately it seems that there is a lot of scaremongering in the EU.
> Should I tell him about statistics? I’d be heartless if I did.
What?? That's the only actually truthful and objective information you can give to him. How is that "heartless"? You don't need to tell him that in a cold voice and never acknowledge his fears and feelings, you can discuss all that and make him feel better somehow.
But telling someone truthful information - is not heartless, it's one of the best things you can do for them.
> It looks like a lottery nobody wants to play.
I would suggest you tell the people you are referring to here to stay in bed. And if they must get out of bed, at least never go downstairs.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-o...
People overwhelmingly don't the consider the probability of mortality in their daily lives, so why are they considering it now ?
One thing is to bash the EU politicians because that's kind of what they are there for, other thing is to bash health authorities, regulators, doctors and scientists out of some sick sense of nationalism and superiority.
It's just sad.
Norway, Germany, Denmark and other countries regulator bodies worked together to identify the anomaly, what triggers it, and how to deal with it, and this will prevent unnecessary deaths of people that are committed to help stop this pandemic by taking a vaccine.
That's how these agencies should work, that's why everyone should be relieved about taking a vaccine - they didn't create new protocols, or closed their eyes, or bent over politics, just because this vaccine effort is important. They know what they are doing, and questioning them out of arrogance it's just an expression of ignorance.
https://ibb.co/5TmLRPL