Having watched the UK's MHRA briefing on AstraZeneca safety, it was refreshing to hear scientists and experts giving their view, rather than reading nonsense from journalists.
Here's a summary and a few thoughts.
UK safety folks (MHRA) think there's a reasonable possibility that some deaths are being caused by the vaccine, with the likely mechanism being that the immune system gets overstimulated and hence causes blood clotting, leading in some cases to fatal events. Not a definite causal link, but a reasonable hypothesis it seems.
Numbers of deaths is very low (19 deaths from 20m+ jabs). About 4 cases per million of serious symptoms (presumably ICU wards & including deaths).
Of 79 serious cases, 51 are women, 28 are men, but there may not be a gender difference, as high %age of women work in health and social care.
Seems to be fewer cases per million in UK than in EU and elsewhere, probably because UK concentrated on older age groups (and it's known that older people are much less likely to have strong immune responses).
Risk/benefit cut-off point is around age 30. Here's the key chart - which assumes current levels of Covid risk in the community. If Covid levels rise, than risk/benefit cut-off age rises, but if Covid levels fall, then the cut-off age falls. That's important because if Covid levels fall, the logical thing for younger people to do is to avoid AstraZeneca (and - possibly other vaccines if it turns out they have a similar effect). This could be very serious as it's reasonable to think "maybe all vaccines could be dodgy, so if I'm young and healthy, I'll just not bother". This would be pretty catastrophic for the plan to beat Covid by vaccination.
So what to do? I'll have no hesitation in having my second AZ vaccine. But if I was in my 30's or below, I'd be very keen to get an alternative vaccine, and probably be willing to wait a few weeks for it.
For comparison, the risk of serious blood clotting from the contraceptive pill is about 15 times the risk from the AZ vaccine. The UK has already vaccinated millions of health and care workers in the younger age bands, and if I was a 20-something nurse or care worker, I'd be pretty annoyed looking at the graph below, having previously been repeatedly told AZ was perfectly safe, and that other countries were just being malicious in investigating health concerns.
Does anyone here know health/care workers vaccinated, and which vaccine they were offered?
Interestingly, the European Medicines Authority also reported today, with similar findings to the UK authority, but different recommendations.
EMA says risk of serious blood clot is about 1 in 100,000 and they suggest that each European country should make it its own mind about which vaccine to use with which group, depending on their views of risks for their citizens.