AstraZeneca To Withdraw COVID Vaccine Globally as Demand Dips (reuters.com) 83
AstraZeneca said on Tuesday it had initiated the worldwide withdrawal of its COVID-19 vaccine due to a "surplus of available updated vaccines" since the pandemic. From a report: The company also said it would proceed to withdraw the vaccine Vaxzevria's marketing authorizations within Europe. "As multiple, variant COVID-19 vaccines have since been developed there is a surplus of available updated vaccines," the company said, adding that this had led to a decline in demand for Vaxzevria, which is no longer being manufactured or supplied. According to media reports, the Anglo-Swedish drugmaker has previously admitted in court documents that the vaccine causes side-effects such as blood clots and low blood platelet counts.
Re:Side effects (Score:4, Informative)
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And then even with the blood clotting, your chances were good to survive unless you had a rare blood clotting disorder, which was checked 3 separate times before you got jabbed with the needle.
I agree with most of your point, but the checks would depend on when you got the vaccine.I had my first Astra Zeneca vaccine at the end of February 2021 which was before the issues with blood clotting were discovered / published.
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Looking for the statistics for the State I live in, there were
2 Covid fatalities amongst 880 000 population under 15 years old.
55 Covid fatalities amongst 867 000 pop. in the age group 15-34 (0.006% based on infections)
The early figures were much worse, something like 5% mortality for 60-79 and 20% or 25% (I forget) in the age group 80+, that was based on the number of infections. My first vaccination was in late April 2021 and it was AZ, the second one and the subsequent boosters were something el
Re:Side effects (Score:4, Insightful)
1 of 100,000 clots (not necessarily deaths) is way less than death chance from covid, even in low mortality groups.
To put this into perspective 1 in 100k is higher than the average unvaccinated teens risk of death from covid in 2022. 11 in 100k was higher than the risk of covid death for average person in their 20's.
Risk from AZ vaccine was closer to 11 in 100k for clots generally, brain clots specifically (cerebral venous thrombosis) 2.5 per 100k. Clotting issues skewed significantly younger which intersected with less inherent risk from infection.
While one can make the argument that AZ would have certainly been better than nothing for those of advanced age that kind of analysis has been a false choice for years. AZ should have been pulled long ago.
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> including when the whole blood clot information came to light, and the frequency was about 1 in 100,000
Even back in 2021 it was acknowledged the risk was 1 in 55,000.
https://covid19-sciencetable.c... [covid19-sciencetable.ca]
"The risk of VITT in Canada as of May 8, 2021 has been estimated to be approximately 1 per 55,000 doses, but several presumptive cases are still under investigation."
1976 Swine Flu Vaccine: 1 serious event per 10,000 -- vaccine withdrawn
1999 Rotavirus Vaccine: 1-2 serious events per 10,000 -- vaccine withdr
Re:Side effects (Score:5, Informative)
According to this letter [bmj.com], the 1 in 800 figure comes from:
Archive.ph link [archive.ph]
Wayback machine link [archive.org]
Key observations about that paper:
* They didn't have the raw data. Both in the summary, and in the links below, they state the data source is web searches. The paper lists various reasons why the numbers in their analysis might be wrong and might not match-up with the general public.
* Section 3.4 of the linked paper shows the placebo group as having ~1 in 5000 Serious Adverse Events. So according to that, EVEN THE PLACEBO is too dangerous to deploy to the public! Perhaps the definition of SAE changed between 1999 to 2022 if the Rotoviorus vaccine is safer than the Covid placebo?
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2022 COVID-19 Vaccine: 1 serious event in 800 -- vaccine promoted
Nope. The COVID-19 vaccine didn't have anywhere near that level of serious events. If it did we'd have a public health catastrophe on our hands worse than COVID itself. But we don't.
Don't blindly repost shit when it doesn't even pass a red-face test.
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Nope. The COVID-19 vaccine didn't have anywhere near that level of serious events. If it did we'd have a public health catastrophe on our hands worse than COVID itself. But we don't.
Don't blindly repost shit when it doesn't even pass a red-face test.
The 1 in 800 reference comes from an analysis of the original Pfizer and Moderna phase III studies.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
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https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.go... [nih.gov]
So one analysis on a pre-trial that didn't agree with other data and that resulted in no correlation with actual adverse effects in the resulting real world results. Got it.
Again, if it actually resulted in a 1 in 800 case we would have a public health catastrophe on our hands. We don't. We didn't even with the AZ vaccine the rollout of which was temporarily halted when it was discovered to have effects *far rarer* then 1 in 800.
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So one analysis on a pre-trial that didn't agree with other data and that resulted in no correlation with actual adverse effects in the resulting real world results. Got it.
I don't know what "pre-trial" means. The data analyzed was from the same phase III trials that formed the objective basis of the EUAs. This is real data that warrants attention.
Again, if it actually resulted in a 1 in 800 case we would have a public health catastrophe on our hands. We don't. We didn't even with the AZ vaccine the rollout of which was temporarily halted when it was discovered to have effects *far rarer* then 1 in 800.
I disagree with this characterization. 1 in 800 is merely 400k people. Even if all these people died it would add only 12% to the background of expected yearly deaths.
We do know when vaccine recipients are closely monitored and tested the findings are concerning...
https://link.springer.com/arti... [springer.com]
We also know there has been a sig
Re:Side effects (Score:4, Interesting)
To add to your point, concerns about vaccine-induced blood clotting [cbsnews.com] goes back 20 years before the Covid vaccines existed. We have no evidence that any of the Covid vaccines or mRNA vaccines are any worse than vaccines we used before. It's like every time a new vaccine comes out, the same exact complaints and concerns surface, each time the media treats it like it is something new.
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It was useful as an alternative for people who would accept vaccination in general but did not want the RNA tech.
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Of the 12 "global" vaccines only 2 of them are mRNA based (China also has their own, so 3 in the world) so people still suspicious of mRNA still have options. In the US I believe Novavax is on the market now which is a more traditional subunit vaccine.
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It was useful as an alternative for people who would accept vaccination in general but did not want the RNA tech.
And for all the parts of the world where the cost of Pfizer was too high, or the (very) cold chain wasn't possible. Or where you had these but wanted to roll out vaccines faster than a single supplier could give you the doses. The vaccine was good, just not quite as good as Pfizer. The BBC article on the subject includes this quote "According to independent estimates, over 6.5 million lives were saved in the first year of use alone." I think the fatalities due to side effects were somewhere around 100 peopl
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If you're that worried about a covid vaccine, definitely don't take aspirin with all its side effects [fda.gov] and possible issues with its use. And let's not get into the even worse side effects [fda.gov] from Aleve.
You don't even need a doctor to get something so dangerous! Talk about needing withdrawn from the market.
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And by "side effects" you mean keeping people alive.
No he probably meant blood clots. Four in a million [openaccessgovernment.org] would get blood clots and one of those four would die. Possibly he could have been referring to Bell's Palsy. Now, is that lower than the risk you'd face from CV19? Probably. However, just acting like nothing bad can happen or side effects do not exist isn't helpful, either.
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As a comparison, about one in a thousand people infected with measles dies. The Covid19 mortality rate is smaller than this, but still much higher than the mortality rate attributed to potential vaccine side effects, and the infection is/was much more widespread. Probably a factor to consider is also that a vaccinated person is more likely, at least in most of the western world, to be also monitored for side effects.
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Re:Side effects (Score:4, Insightful)
Correct. The AZ vaccine still protected people from COVID-19, but carried more risk than other vaccines for COVID-19. Getting vaccinated is the right move for anyone that had no specific medical condition that made the vaccine more harmful than beneficial, but there's comparative risk, and serious side effects like blood clots are worth weighing if one has a choice of which vaccine to take.
It's not really all that different a concept than the situation with the Polio vaccines. Salk's killed, injected vaccine had the risk of secondary infection from the injection site and a few documented cases where the virus wasn't properly neutralized so it caused direct infection. Sabin's live, oral vaccine did on occasion lead to clusters of Polio outbreaks along with mutation of the Polio virus. Even as someone that hates needles with unbridled passion I'm more favorable to Salk's vaccine. The failure to prepare it properly leading to a few cases of Polio given to patients were very rare occurrences, while Sabin's vaccine lead to far greater numbers of clusters of Polio. But if I had been alive during the Polio epidemic and only Sabin's vaccine was available in my area I wouldn't have refused it.
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Correct. The AZ vaccine still protected people from COVID-19, but carried more risk than other vaccines for COVID-19. Getting vaccinated is the right move for anyone that had no specific medical condition that made the vaccine more harmful than beneficial
Yet, there were blanket mandates, including for people that were known to have adverse effects/conditions.
Re:Side effects (Score:4, Informative)
For Bells Palsy, you were three times more likely [neurologyadvisor.com] to be affected by it after being infected than getting a vaccine.
âoeSARS CoV-2 infection was linked with a 3.23-fold increased risk of BP [Bell palsy] compared with SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, which favors a protective role of the vaccine in reducing the incidence of BP associated with exposure to SARS-CoV-2,â the researchers concluded.
Also, from the NIH [nih.gov]:
Conclusion: In our patient population, there is a higher risk of developing facial palsy within 2 months of COVID-19 infection versus vaccination. Vaccinated patients are not at higher risk of developing facial palsy.
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Who touts that severed from comparing statistical risks? And why?
Re:Side effects (Score:4, Informative)
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Canada has about 34 million people, and our overall vaccination rate was very good (at least for the first round, it dropped with every booster).
More than 34 people died of COVID, but our dead rate was substantially lower than the US which had more people politically opposed to the shots (because they're fucking morons. A virus doesn't care who you vote for) so if the AZ vaccine killed one in a million it was more than worth it.
Having said that, if there's an even safer vaccine available you'd still be fool
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I wasn't arguing, I was taking a shot at the math to back you up.
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and pointless to do so.
It's not pointless. Quantifying the risk (even or especially small risks) can be beneficial to illustrate the contrast between choices.
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I am a big proponent of speaking the truth, but plenty of people want simple answers and shut down irrationally if the answer is too complicated for them.
The bad news is even the simplest issues are fairly complex when you examine them closely.
Those people needed 'vaccine good, no vaccine bad', and when you talk about vaccine risk they have next to no ability to compare that rationally to the risk of not getting vaccinated. I'm not saying they should be lied to, but giving them more details than they can h
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giving them more details than they can handle is counter productive.
“Tell the truth, or someone will tell it for you.”
-Stephanie Klein
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You saw the effect of giving them details - unable to assess risk, each item was 'bad' and there were more items in the vaccine risk column than in the no-vaccine risk column.
People died unnecessarily.
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People died unnecessarily.
I'm sure some did. However, I'd still prefer to be open and honest than deceitful and "right". It's one thing to lie to a child to make them feel better or to trick them into eating their turnips. It's something else entirely to withhold information because you think the public cannot handle it or will misinterpret. I think hiding the truth almost always backfires, eventually. I get what you are saying, but I think we have different values.
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Consider this - some choices are personal and some are communal by the very nature of their effects. The unvaccinated didn't just risk themselves, but everyone around them.
Their right to misinterpret the truth ends when their ignorance is killing innocent people. Or at least it should.
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Your viewpoint seems to assume that tho
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People died unnecessarily.
They sure did [imgur.com], but at least the vast majority [thedailybeast.com] were the stupid [cnn.com] ones [theguardian.com] who were allowed [nbcnews.com] to vote [nbcnews.com].
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You cannot burn body autonomy on the altar of public health and call it a fair trade. That's unethical. If it was ethical then Dr. Menegle's research would have been considered legitimate.
Hell of a thing to draw an equivalence between "mandatory vaccine with rare side effects" and "literally torturing people to death".
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While the facts about vaccines and injury rates are compelling, that doesn't translate into a right to use government force and mandate your view.
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Should the health department have the authority to mandate that the guy working at the local sandwich shop has to wash his hands after using the bathroom? After all, frequent use of hand soap has the common side effect of making the user's hands dry and itchy. I personally think that dooming the sandwich artist to dry skin is worth it for the greater good of not spreading foodborne illness, but is that just a slippery slope to allowing Dr. Mengele to torture people to death?
My point, of course, is that th
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You don't get to just hand wave off examples you don't like (you can try, but...). You don't get to distance yourself fro
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We certainly disagree on whether vaccine mandates were a reasonable level of infringement on bodily autonomy, but that wasn't really my point.
We do actually seem to agree that such infringements exist on a spectrum, and I'm arguing is that "vaccine mandate during of a pandemic" is so far down the spectrum from "Nazi doctor performing medical experiments on unwilling concentration camp prisoners" that it's pretty unhinged to draw an equivalence between the two.
It's along the same lines as the anti-vaxxer
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We certainly disagree on whether vaccine mandates were a reasonable level of infringement on bodily autonomy
We categorically do. I'd also point out that I'd physically fight about it. I would be willing to fight anyone who tried to forcibly vaccinate me or someone I cared about. Before you start your horrified pearl-clutching, let me triple-down and be super-clear YES that absolutely means with guns, force against force. Soooo, the next time you consider such things, understand that I'm not alone on this. You or folks like you might have to enforce your will at gunpoint and you might not have enough willing-gun-p
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Notice how I don't mention voluntary relationships? That's because there were plenty of coerced, non-consensual, force-based mandates to point at instead.
Where? In all seriousness and good faith, I can honestly say I'm not aware of a government that forcibly vaccinated their population. Are you considering things like travel bans for the unvaccinated to be a use of force? I would've thought not given your comment on voluntary relationships.
You and your ilk just never got the chance to put "anti-vaxxers" on cattle cars, but I have zero doubts you would have given the opportunity. Zero.
This is tinfoil hat levels of paranoia and fear of the other.
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Where?
Were you asleep? Mandates. There were restrictions on travel, speech, employment options, education and threats of force against military and civilian refuseniks who would not comply. Further and more strident threats were made, but didn't quite take hold as the pandemic numbers waned.
This is tinfoil hat levels of paranoia and fear of the other.
What complete and utter bullshit. You were deaf if you didn't hear calls to discriminate, jail, hurt, or even kill "anti-vaxers" during the pandemic. People like you definitely would have put refuseniks on cattle cars if you c
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Were you asleep? Mandates. There were restrictions on travel, speech, employment options, education
I suppose I didn't understand what you meant by "force". Based on your saying you'd "physically fight about it" I was imagining the vaccine police driving around in a van scooping up the unvaccinated (which, if it isn't abundantly clear, did not happen to my knowledge). I don't exactly consider it a coercive use of force when the government says I need to where corrective lenses when I drive because I have bad eyesight, in the same way I don't think it's a coercive use of force when the governments says y
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I think you need to re-evaluate how you're informing yourself about the people who disagree with you.
I cannot just take them at their word? They told us [twitter.com] they wanted us dead and in internment camps and mocked [currentaffairs.org] those who'd died already. In the USA it was proposed in several different situations, but didn't quite go that far.
You're being (intentionally, I think) naive. Westernized countries like Australia (and I won't even mention what China did) had actual camps they forcefully placed refuseniks in. They couldn't just say "Well that's a super small portion of the population, let's let it go." Nope, they jum
an affront to God and nature, pure hubris (Score:1)
It's what God wanted.
Re:Side effects (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Side effects (Score:5, Insightful)
The experts actually capable of making informed decisions had weighed in. "Doing your own research" was code word for "I saw this post on Facebook."
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What serious side effects? How common were they? Everyone *I* know, has had one version or another of the vaccine, and no one's had side effects... and saying "I know" includes reports from conventions I go to (that *do* report incidents of COVID).
Time to get off... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Time to get off... (Score:4, Informative)
The Gravy Train has stopped...time to get off.
Except that this was the cheapest covid vaccine, and for the first year+ was sold at cost.
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A point that would have otherwise been lost to me.
In Canada we had a choice of whichever vaccine we wanted, subject to the information they had. For example some vaccines weren't recommended to children, and therefore weren't offered to Children. But regardless of choice, there was no cost.
But AstraZeneca stands out, because some time after they started offering it, they stopped offering it due to side effects. They also recommended that people who did take it get another vendor's, like Pfizer as a secon
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"yes it cost us X amount, so were selling it at X"
hahahaha sweet summer child
The nutjobs & Russian bots are having a field (Score:3)
AZ (Score:2)
In AZ can you get vaccinated against Kari Lake and Krysten Sinema?
Side effects a possible factor as well (Score:3)
Via: https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
AstraZeneca recently admitted that its vaccine, initially called Covishield, could cause very rare side effects like blood clots and low blood platelet counts, The Telegraph reported.
The admission came after the company was slapped with a class action lawsuit in the UK, which claimed that the vaccine had caused deaths and severe injuries and sought damages up to £100m for about 50 victims.
Some studies conducted during the pandemic found the vaccine was 60 to 80 per cent effective in protecting against the novel coronavirus.
But subsequent research found that it caused some people to develop potentially fatal blood clots.
AstraZeneca’s admission that the vaccine could potentially prove lethal ran counter to its insistence in 2023 that it would “not accept that TTS is caused by the vaccine at a generic level”.
In April 2021, the World Health Organisation also confirmed that the vaccine could have fatal side effects. “A very rare adverse event called thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome, involving unusual and severe blood clotting events associated with low platelet counts, has been reported after vaccination with this vaccine.”
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Via: https://www.independent.co.uk/... [independent.co.uk]
AstraZeneca recently admitted that its vaccine, initially called Covishield, could cause very rare side effects like blood clots and low blood platelet counts, The Telegraph reported.
Credibility gone to zero right there... The Telegraph, that bastion of journalistic integrity and even they couldn't spin it as "will". I notice a lot of "could" in your post, as if anyone was unwilling to commit to a statement. I could have a date have a billion dollars by tonight. I mean it really could happen. Could.
AstraZeneca was never updated (Score:2)
The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna blew AZ out of the water. It was never updated for any of the Covid variants, and because of this has no effect on any of the strains circulating now.
mRNA > viral vector (Score:2)