The Vaccine Roadclot

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

A Year of Covid-19

By this week, it’s been about a year since the Wuhan Virus struck my shores up in the Norse part of the world. A year of isolation, turbulence, and further deterioration of the quality of the public discourse. We joked back in 2016 that we’d cross out that year from our calendars. How innocent we were. Sweet summer children…

So, while we’re (supposed to be) cooped up in our homes and general vicinities, holding on hope that this angel of death is going to pass us by soon, why don’t we take a moment to set up a sort of disclaimer. A short-hand for dealing with the global pandemic, if you will…

First off; the vaccines work. Just not like you think they do. Vaccines have never been guarantee. They’re a hurdle for infectious disease. Sometimes, even oft-times, a big enough hurdle to kill its onslaught. A vaccine is a wave-breaker. And if you’re given the chance, if you’re next up on the rooster, you should probably take it (barring medical complications or conditions that could severely affect you in a bad way). And remember that taking the vaccines is not just your potential subjective benefit. It’s for the benefit of your community. Your family. Don’t be an obstinate ass-hat.

Secondly; Stop bitching about it morphing your DNA. If you’re whining about your precious gene-sequence being corrupted, odds are it’s not a very precious gene pool to begin with. Plenty of vaccines re-work the DNA in subtle ways by introducing modified mRNA to the mix. You can’t get antibodies or T-cells without setting up some factories for them. And you can’t set up factories without supplying some plans. That’s what the mRNA vaccines do. They don’t fuck up our gene pool any worse than your mother-aunt already has. So shut up.

Thirdly; side-effects are sadly an inevitability with vaccines. The faster the production, the shorter the testing, the more there’ll be. But most bad side-effects are statistically non-existent. Trouble is, when you are to vaccinate billions of people, even statistical irrelevancies become practical certainty. That’s just how statistics work. And seeing as most human beings are practically incapable of measuring or judging odds and chances, just don’t worry about it. Don’t worry about it, because you’re not equipped to.

Fourthly; a lot of hate is being levied against medical professionals, infectious disease doctors, and even vaccine coordinators. If you’re one of the haters; fuck you. Fuck you sideways. These people, to the best of our knowledge, work to the the best of their abilities to save people’s lives. The vast majority of them aren’t trying to screw you over for some twisted political agenda. They are trying their best to navigate medical assistance through a web of laws, bureaucracy, disingenuous and signal politics, and hate-guzzling trolls to save our fucking lives. By any conceivable meritocratic metric, they know what they’re doing a hell of a lot better than you do. Here’s an idea for a benchmark: If you can’t fathom the proper use of a period to clip a sentence, or if you think that multiple exclamation marks is valid for anything but comic relief, don’t think you’re intelligent enough to validly criticize public health workers that are slavering away through the worst conditions of their careers to save your life. You don’t have the cognitive capacity or validity to criticize them. Just a bunch of misaligned hate and self-loathing. Go dig a pit and stay there until the coast is clear, you fucking hate-monger.

Fifthly; masks have become a contentious topic. Mostly in the binary US. Over there, you’re either a sheep or a malicious culprit, depending on where you lean on the political spectrum. But from what I’ve seen during my work commute or on the news, people aren’t capable of wearing the masks properly. From interviews I’ve had with doctors, masks were discussed to be scrapped as unreliable even in the controlled settings of most surgeries before the pandemic hit. Odds are, in the microbial chaos of everyday life, outside of a controlled environment, masks are ineffective at best. At worst, a false safety blanket, that let people rationalize going out unnecessarily. However, we’ve also seen that people aren’t getting infected on the, for example, public transport system where masks have been mandated. Either way, the masks aren’t going to single-handedly save you, and they’re not so fucking important as to justify a civil war. Get a fucking grip.

Which brings us to the next point…

Sixth; though the masks won’t save you, social distancing still might. During the Christmas holidays, the ski slopes of northern Sweden were full of privileged fucking morons. A sad fact that prompted extra measures to be taken to withstand a second… third… I lose track; another wave. So keep distancing yourself! Don’t go to fucking Mexico, for example, just because you want to look for Coco, or because you can’t stand your daughters enough to keep them in the house for a week. Stay in your cave, you fucking troglodytes!

Seventh; even during the Spanish flu pandemic, beginning at the ass end of the first world war, the disease was politicized. The very reason that it is now called ‘the Spanish flu’ isn’t because it began in Spain, but because Spain couldn’t silence reports on it. For all we know, the first deadly outbreak of that strain happened in Kansas, in troop camps awaiting orders to ship to Europe. And with the liberating troops finally on the shores, the disease spread. And no one wanted to acknowledge it in fear of demoralizing the population. So even though it’s natural for nations to politicise a pandemic, don’t play along, you muppets.

Eight; because that being said, China seems particularly wild in shifting blame for the pandemic eruption. According to them it’s either India, or the US, it’s the Australians that exported the virus to China (according to frenzied attempts to obfuscate by Chinese state media). Bears to note that all three countries have been in recent conflicts, both violent and diplomatic, with the Chinese People’s Empire. Make of that what you will…

Ninth; it’s not over. The Spanish flu stuck around for three years. Hopefully, we’ve gotten better at dealing with vaccinations and preventative measures in the hundred years since. But odds are, 2021 won’t see us quite back to normal, and we’re quite simply going to have to accept that. I know; it sucks. But it is what it is.

/Sebastian Lindberg 23/2-2021