Thank you. It resonated with me.
I hope that, eventually, in the distant future, someone holds someone else accountable.
Cesare
Karma: 87
I need empathetic support in screaming against yet another dumbass decision (6 “strange” blood clots events… in 7 million shots).
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/13/us/politics/johnson-johnson-vaccine-blood-clots-fda-cdc.html
So what? It still comes from ethanol. Again, people with this deficiency are not told to stay away from alcohol no matter what.
I am writing from the UK (decent vaccination campaign) as an Italian person (horrible vaccination campaign), and agreeing with your critiques on the USA (pretty good vaccination campaign) is disheartening. Just why are we so bad at doing crucial things, as a society? It’s so incredibly sad.
Bless. Being angry together with strangers on the internet is so much better than being angry alone.
Zvi, I live in the UK and back in February I had asked my GP to please call me if they had any spare doses.
Well, my GP called me on the evening of the 7th of March, telling me that they had an open vial of Astrazeneca, and to come down if I could. I asked if I could also bring my partner, he said “sure, there’s more than one dose in there and we close in 20 minutes”.
So I did get vaccinated before 60 years old were even eligible, and so did my partner. For the record, I am 29 and in perfect health, and she is 23 and not even a patient of that GP.
This happened to many other people I know, and I have seen even more of that on social media. My understanding is that, while the policy is clear, GPs do have a lot of freedom in trying to avoid wasting vaccines.My guess about the thing you reported… is that some GPs misunderstood guidelines. I wasn’t able to find the official ones, though (I suspect those might not be publicly available).
One more point: given how doses work each GP could theoretically “risk to waste” (and hence give to any passerby) at most 9 doses of Astrazeneca, and 5 doses of Pfizer per day (the number of doses you get from a vial minus one). That doesn’t seem like a huge number to me. Any bigger “abuse” of the system (i.e. give doses to people before it’s their turn) would still be detected quite easily.
I didn’t word it very well, the original thought got lost along the way, thanks for pointing it out!
I meant to conclude that since the UK cannot afford to lift restrictions for vaccinated people then they follow the logical route of vaccinating by age cohorts: this will keep deaths as low as they can be.
However, in the US they are actually enabling vaccinated people to do stuff… which will boost the economy significantly, and they can afford to do so due to the degree mRNA vaccines seem to block transmission. So it makes sense to allow anyone that wants to be vaccinated to do that, instead of the inevitable slowdown caused by using an age restrictive criterion.
This post is incredibly insightful, looking forward to the sequences that expand it.
Great job.
I had a better one, but a quick googling gave me this article: https://today.rtl.lu/news/luxembourg/a/1685866.html
(second paragraph)
My thoughts exactly. What a QR Code could do is to store names, and perhaps the dates they got the vaccine. If people have time to check photos, then they might as well do so on any photographic ID, whose name matches the one on the QR Code, and which is shown together with the QR code wherever that’s relevant.
My main problem with this is the following: I would totally recommend Astrazeneca to everyone if the choice was between a) Astrazeneca, b) no vaccine.
But this is not the case (this has never been the case!). There are better, more effective vaccines—even not taking into account this CVT mess. In a world where we can produce infinitely many vaccines in 1 second, we’d have Pfizer/Moderna jabs for everyone.
So… why are we still producing Astrazeneca? It is the least likely to have an effect on transmission—we know for instance that it is less than 10% effective against B135, which is about 20% of the cases in Europe right now (see Luxembourg data). It does protect against severe disease from ancestral and B117 (still no data on B135 severe diseases), but… so does being young and healthy.
I think that we are using Astrazeneca as an emergency measure—we don’t have enough Pfizer, and people are dying. This is fine. But then, as you correctly point out, it begs the question: why are we giving it to people with close-to-none chances of dying from Covid19?
The real answer is Astrazeneca. More than half of vaccinated people in the UK have been vaccinated with Astrazeneca… and they are concerned about the actual effectiveness of this vaccine, and possible variant outbreaks (there have been three instances of “surge testing” where they go door-to-door following an outbreak: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/surge-testing-for-new-coronavirus-covid-19-variants). According to Eric Topol (whose opinion is based on a few studies), Astrazeneca is not effective against B.1.3.5 (south-african variant).
Due to effectiveness of Pfizer and Moderna, the US (and Israel) can afford to relax restrictions much more than their european counterparts.
I’m not convinced. The amounts of alcohol involved are very small and people with this deficiency are not told to stay away from alcohol no matter what.
I don’t think the comparison with lactic acid is adequate—alcohol is a much more common substance, which is present in small concentration basically everywhere. I just think that the quantity is very small to matter, even with the “local” argument.