Monday 19 April 2021

"How does the risk of serious side-effects from the AstraZenecca vaccine compare with other risks?"

Good infographic from the BBC.

For a 25-year old, reducing a 23-in-a-million risk to a 11-in-a-million risk doesn't seem worth the hassle and giving that injection is probably a wasted expense/effort.

Dr John Campbell on YouTube reckons that most of the deaths linked to the jab (primarily in younger adults, especially women) are because it is sometimes inadvertently injected into a blood vessel, not into the muscle. Apparently they don't do the decent thing and pull the syringe back to check.

15 comments:

Piotr Wasik said...

sure, but why everybody focuses on death risk? and how about long covid risk? I don't want to learn how it is to have "brain fog"

Mark Wadsworth said...

PW, fair point, but this is about comparing like-with-like.

The chance of dying in a road accident is tiny, the chance of ending up with long term disability is a lot higher; there might be other less serious side-effects of the jab; the same as the risk of ending up with 'long covid' is a lot higher than dying of it.

It is difficult to do 100% 'fair' comparisons.

Piotr Wasik said...

MW, true that, and I am not strictly complaining about your entry here :) just saying "long covid" is missing across the board, apparently about 13% of all infections still show symptoms after 12 weeks, hell knows how many of these are truly permanent. for me it is a big deal

Piotr Wasik said...

...across the board in media I mean. and I would be guessing vaccines may reduce the chances of being hit by long covid, as they give a lot of immunity built up before the infection starts. common sense guess only, no actual data. When I take this into account, with risk of long term disability from the vaccine being really low it seems, I clearly choose vaccination.

Piotr Wasik said...

heh, I hijacked your blog entry - another thing. it is still worth 25 year olds, as it reduces the chances they can pass the virus to others, possibly more vulnerable. so maybe a tiny gain for the 25 old vaccine recipients, but a serious gain for the whole society. one step closer to the cherished herd immunity.

Mark Wadsworth said...

PW, you make perfectly reasonable points. Maybe it is of overall benefit if they have the jab, but it is not nearly as clearly cut as oldies having the jab.

Nessimmersion said...

I havw seen testimony to the effect that IF you were not advised to take the flu jab, there is no point in taking one of the Corona virus jabs.
After all one of the hazards of the flu was
Long Flu ( Its also known as post viral syndrome, but sounds scarier with a new name, discussed here in this 2017 paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-17497-6)
The worst is of course "Long Vaccine"

Mark Wadsworth said...

N, lots of people say lots of things about Covid and jabs (including me) and most of them are wrong most of the time.

Andrew Carey said...

@Piotr Wasik
Curious to know where your data on long Covid comes from.
The Zoe Symptom Tracker has data on long Covid which is close to an order of magnitude less ( around 8% after 4 weeks, 4% after 8 weeks and 2% after 12 weeks, still having symptoms ). Admittedly the Zoe data skews young , I think about 30% of the people making submissions have had 1 jab, but their long Covid number is a long way off your number,

L fairfax said...

Worth it for getting rid of lockdown though.

Mark Wadsworth said...

AC, good research as ever!

LF, my thoughts exactly. I had Covid last December, it wasn't that bad, I'd rather not have it again, but hey. But if my jab was one jab closer to the end of lockdown, it was worth it.

Piotr Wasik said...

AC, 4.2 million cases up till 6th of March, self-reported long covid in the ONS survey >= 12 weeks: 697k from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthandsocialcare/conditionsanddiseases/bulletins/prevalenceofongoingsymptomsfollowingcoronaviruscovid19infectionintheuk/1april2021 - so: 0.7 out of 4.2 is 16.6%; can't remember where I got 13% from. It *is* self reported almost by the nature of the question: "do you *experience* symptoms?", but so is most neurological issues (pains, tinglings), psychiatric (mood disorders, "brain fog" or insomnia, in theory some of them testable but currently not tested by doctors). Others are sort of testable, like decreased cardiovascular fitness, or permanent smell loss. Surely there were articles published that counted number of patients with scars on heart or lungs, or brain abnormalities visible in MRI, but they were done on small scale and for a subset of cases, e.g. hospital patients or a single football team. Somebody may eventually extrapolate from these small samples and map them into the whole big picture, but I am not aware of any summary like this.

Sven Noakes said...

In all of the discussions about Long Covid there very rarely appears to be an acknowledgement of general decline in fitness because of inactivity perhaps being a confounding factor. In our normal lives, many of us will have walked to the bus/train, spent the working day moving between offices, labs, workshops, cafe's, etc. Using a fitness watch I have seen that a day at my workplace is worth an additional ~5,000 steps compared to working at home. That's getting on for 2-3 miles! Youngsters at school/college - or not - are missing even more!

Dinero said...

The government could have combined the online booking process with Side effect reporting including negatives. A data collecting opportunity.

Bayard said...

Din, they probably didn't want any of their theories being upset by actual data.