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Originally Posted by haertig
Even more mystifying to me is that they shut down distribution of the AstraZeneca vaccine because there were reports of blood clots following injection. Then they found out that the incidence of blood clots following the vaccine was actually quite a bit lower than the incidence of blood clots in the unvaccinated population. So they started the distribution back up again. Now, I just read that they shut it down again ... for blood clots.
Apparently, AstraZeneca may be a preventative treatment for blood clots, not a cause of them.
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You may not be quite up to date on this. There is no dispute now that AZ causes a very specific and brand new syndrome, VIPIT, which is nothing like the common or garden variety deep venous thrombosis in the legs. The two are distinct syndromes and should not be compared.
What AZ causes is an immune phenomenon whereby the body makes an antibody that destroys its own platelets, and the syndrome causes clots in the cerebral venous sinus or splanchnic veins. Unlike regular DVT, the fatality rate of this syndrome is running at 25%, and we have no idea what risk factors there are (apart from it's skewing to younger and female), and are only just starting to learn how to recognise and treat it. Symptoms tend to be quite nonspecific - headache, abdominal pain, feeling unwell - so late diagnosis is a problem also.
Yes it is rare in the general vaccinated population - which skews elderly in early rollout phases - but it may be more common in certain subgroups that we haven't delineated yet (I'm watching closely to see if it's more common in people who already have autoimmune conditions, for example, since that tends to be a risk factor for more autoimmune conditions).
And by "rare", right now we're talking 4 per million, which means one in a million dead. Young, healthy people killed. Given that there are excellent alternative vaccines that don't carry this risk, we as a society are generally not terribly keen on just randomly knocking off people with vaccines. And I think that's ok. Being cavalier with fatal vaccine complications is a great way to cause vaccine hesitancy to spread like wildfire, and that's the last thing we need.