Any thoughts on the reality of the new reports about the potential that the vaccine exposes receivers to a risk of blood clot problems?
I did a quick Google Scholar search but nothing seemed to apply just looking at the title listing in the summary page. The stories I’ve seen reported in the press seem weak on any actual details about how that vaccine might produce the problem while it seems unheard of with the other vaccines. Incident rates seem really small so it makes me wonder. Are we really getting the real story here or is this a case of some chicken little worries about the sky falling?
I also wonder, given a prior post on the correlation implying some causality, if that thought should not shift one’s views towards not really getting the whole story. If so, just what “the story” might actually be.
This comes from an AstraZeneca press release, but it sounds like there’s strong evidence that the AZ vaccine doesn’t cause blood clots and this is a typical case of “if anything bad happens after you take a drug, it gets reported as a side-effect”, which is why one of the possible adverse effects of the Moderna vaccine is getting struck by lightning:
(Emphasis added)
From Twitter, it looks like the rates of clotting-related issues in UK recipients of the AstraZeneca and Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines are essentially indistinguishable.
An update to this comment: there is now some evidence to suggest the rates of cerebral venous sinus thrombosis are substantially different in UK recipients of the two vaccines. It is a very low rate (30 in 28 million), but there does seem to be a real difference there.
If there’s an actual risk of blood clot problems, we should see something similar reported in the UK, given the millions of doses they already used.
We don’t see any similar reports coming from the UK. The opposite seems true (BBC).
Is the UK hiding this kind of news? I doubt.
Are there problem only outside of the UK?
If this is the case, “the story” might actually be some handling/logistic problem in the vaccines production/transportation/storage in other countries that turns some batches bad.
If this is the case we should see higher % of problems where the batches are mishandled.
I could not find numbers about this, it looks like at the first problem some countries are halting the distribution of entire batches.
A clearer smoking gun would be multiple people having blood clots problems after receiving doses from the same batch.
The size of the batch would help estimate how unlikely that event is.
Italy halted ABV5811 and ABV2856, but unfortunately I could not find how big these batches actually are. If you have any idea I’d be glad to know.
I’d feel completely safe to get a vaccine in the UK.
In lack of the specific batch information, I’d feel safe outside of the UK too.
I’ve found a post from EMA claiming:
but still no signal on how big is the batch single countries get.
Off the top of my head, it could easily be the case that we still need to rule out that the groups getting the vaccine are already more prone to blood clots. In particular, I seem to remember some talk about Covid infections leading to blood clots, and many of the early vaccinations have been given to folks most likely to be exposed to Covid. We’ve also seen that “asymptomatic” (referring specifically to the symptoms of cough, fever, & anosmia) Covid seems to be really common in the group of all infections.
It’s not much of a stretch to guess that—if the blood clot problem turns out to be real—it may be at least partly because of those “asymptomatic” infections among the groups we’ve targeted for early vaccination specifically because they are more likely to be exposed (and therefore more likely to have already been infected without knowing) than other groups.
There’s a Twitter thread claiming that there is statistical evidence that blood clots are unusually common in Germany after getting the AstraZeneca vaccine:
I still think stopping vaccination is insane for several reasons:
According to this source, approximate 200 people are dying of COVID per day in Germany. Even if we assume that 6 out of every 1.6 million people who get the AZ vaccine get blood clots and die, that would be 365 deaths total in Germany or 2 days worth of COVID deaths.
According to this source, the survival rate of cerebral venous-sinus thrombosis is ~95%, and taking that into account, even if the 6 / 1.6 million number is correct, we would expect only 1/20th of those people to die of it, leading to approximately 20 people in Germany dying of this (again, vs ~200 people per day dying of COVID).
I’m still very skeptical that this 6 / 1.6 million number is actually correct since it’s a very small number and small numbers are possible to get by chance, especially if you’re doing multiple comparisons: Why are we only looking at the number for Germany? Wouldn’t this be reported if it had happened in France, or the UK, or...?
A couple of days ago I came across this deposition to the “German Corona Extra-Parliamentary Inquiry Committee”, by Dr. Vanessa Schmidt-Kruger, who describes herself as “a cell biologist and my specialist field is the functional characterisation and elucidation of proteins”.
She enumerates a range of concerns with the BioNTech vaccine, including purity; toxicity of lipid nanoparticles; dosing and long-term immune effects. There is an almost throw-away comment in there to the effect of: ”...it has also been found that when the LNPs are transported in the blood then thromboses can occur, or haemolysis – haemolysis means the sudden dissolution of erythrocytes, i.e. red blood cells, this causes hypoxia.”
I’m not in a position to evaluate any of this—the deposition is quite long, and technical (altho note that the second half of the doc is just the German version). The presentation.. somewhat twinges my “this might be crackpot” aesethetic sense (as per naming-the-nameless), but I can’t dismiss it out of hand based on that.
Googling a bit finds articles that do discuss polyethylene glycol (the LNP used in the mRNA vaccines) can sometimes have effects of thromboses):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0049384874900243
It’s probably mainly a question of how serious that concern happens to be and the answer isn’t that it’s that problematic.
As far as the crackpot allegation she’s well published researcher: https://www.mdc-berlin.de/research/publications?f%5B0%5D=field_authors%3A337
AstraZeneca is not a RNA based vaccine, so does not contain any LNPs as far as I know.