Vaccines: The single-handed reason that saying “bless you” when you hear someone sneeze no longer signals a genuine fear that that person might drop dead any moment. A scientific marvel that slowly but surely, disease by bloody disease, mutation by soddin’ mutation, is turning the human race immune to the vehement embrace of Grandfather Nurgle.
Vaccines are neat! Especially so one year into the Covid plague, with vaccines on the horizon that promise a return to social interactions, movie theatres, and late nights at the pub.
Meanwhile, elsewhere, as of time of writing, Thailand begrudgingly agrees to continue to use the AstraZeneca vaccine, after shortly joining a slew of nations that have halted the Astra inoculations. Just as there’s an acute vaccine shortage all ’round the globe. Just as China is setting its diplomatic hooks into populations and nations with offers of its own Sinovac vaccine.
There’s got to be a good reason to cease vaccinations though, right? Rumours abound that the British AstraZeneca vaccine is causing blood clots, rumours that Norway, Denmark, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Iceland, (and just ahead of publications also Sweden), and briefly Thailand, have all taken to heart. But according to the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and the World Health Organization (WHO), there’s no reason to believe that the 30-some cases of blood clots among some 5 million Astra-vaccinated people in the EU is anything but a coincidence, and just represents the normal amount of blood clots among the general population. But why then has at least (at the time of writing) nine countries world wide halted the use of the vaccine if the clotting is perfectly natural?
Let us take a look at a few what-ifs to sus out what to make of this controversy. And to do that, let us make some working assumptions. From conversations with doctors, I am lead to understand that stage three trials of vaccines are usually composed of some 30’000 people. Once these 30k have been vaccinated, you document the found side-effects and what level of immunity the vaccine affords, and presto it’s off to the races.
Potential circumstances #1: It’s as the EMA and WHO says. The reported events of blood clots have nothing to do with the Astra vaccine. It’s just stupidity-hysteria. If you don’t have a pharmacological degree or an administrative responsibility for human civilization to survive a deadly and stupefying plague; trust the authorities and shut up.
Potential circumstances #2: AstraZeneca found among their 30k testers the possibility that the vaccine could cause blood clots. Which means, that eventuality should have been on the package. Which means that Norway, Denmark, Estonia, Belgium, and all the rest knew the risks. Bitching about it now seems immature. There’re always risks with pharmaceuticals. All medical drugs are basically poison. They’re just hopefully the right kind of poison at the right time. In such a scenario; chin up and shut up and get on with the program you reactionary twits.
Potential circumstances #3: The blood clots are caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine, but the odds are real fucking low, seeing as they didn’t even show up during testing. If a side effect is to reliably show up during stage 3 trials, the odds of them occurring must be higher than 1 in 30’000 cases. According to the data that this hysteria is based on, the odds are 30 in 5’000’000 of clots occuring. In shortened form, that’s 1 in 166’667 cases. Obviously, it’s possible for Astra to have missed that eventuality in QA, considering it’s more than five times rarer than the least probably side effect that you can expect their trial runs to find.
Potential circumstance #3.5: Okay, we need to keep in mind that people are absolute garbage at internalizing statistics. We’re shit at it. Just plain suck. Confirmation bias, a lack of perspective, and an inability to understand numbers over like 20, makes us woefully ill-equipped to accept long odds and probability. I mean, if we were any good at it, there’d be no money in gambling. But there is! There’s a metric shit-ton of money in gambling. Which would indicate what I’ve been saying: That people are incapable of understanding basic statistics.
So what when you have a vaccine, a vaccine that’s supposed to save human civilization from a slow smother, and the idea is that you’re going to vaccinate some 70% of the world’s population, you’re going to come across some weird effects. Inevitably. Even the really, really, really, really, really, REALLY, unlikely ones. It makes a statistical impossibility a practical inevitability. And that’s fine. It’s okay if thirty people have complications if it immunizes 3.9 million people (seeing as the Astra vaccine is reportedly like 78%-proof) from a deadly disease. How deadly? Well, assuming that all 3.9 million of those people would otherwise catch the bug, it would save 86’848 people. And that’s not counting all the people that those 3.9 million might pass the bug on to. So what we’re weighing here is 30 lives against over 86’000 lives. That’s not even a contest for any responsible government.
In which case, stop being such fucking reactionary babies, you immature shits, and cease your virtue signalling during a global crisis, please okay thanks and bye.
Potential circumstance #4 (the least likely one): AstraZeneca has lied about their stage 3 trial results, and there’re a bunch of problematic side effects that their vaccine can cause. And if so, fuck ’em. Burn AstraZeneca at the stake of public opinion. Chase them off across the English Channel and let them peddle their poison to the politically proven pinhead population there.
Look, things aren’t ideal. The world is not an ideal place, even before the Wuhan Virus gummed up the works. We’re tired of staying at home, we’re sick of social distancing, and we’re fed up with restrictions. Even we who aren’t stupid enough to still believe it’s all a hoax. Everyone wants this nightmare to end. And the solutions aren’t always going to be gentle or nice. The AstraZeneca vaccine is proving itself to be a problematic one, seeing as it can cause a pretty rough flu reaction (especially among those that have already had Covid-19). But it’s still better than the alternative. And even though there’re plenty of different vaccines out there (Moderna, Pfizer, Sinovac, Sputnik V, etc.) everyone’s raging for doses.
We’re not spoiled for choice right now. We need to take what we can get to make it through this global crisis. And we can either whine like little bitches about our world not being perfect, or we can nut up and shut up and get on with the program. You can either be a trooper and do your part by getting vaccinated if/and/or when one is made available to you, or you can be a Belgian baby about it and whine that someone once told you that maybe there’s a statistical impossibly small chance that doing your diligence could maybe be dangerous to you personally. It’s your call.
/Sebastian Lindberg 16/3-2021
WastedWords 