The J&J vaccine has been halted in the EU too. I have no idea if I will get vaccinated any time soon. 
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The list opens up to anyone here in the US on April 18th. We’re already registered in our state and just waiting our turn. (3 of us…the others in our house aren’t old enough yet)
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Yes, it’s apples and oranges procedure-wise, but I was talking about perspective. You don’t often hear people saying they’re not having a surgical procedure because of the risk of death – a risk that might be magnitudes greater than the risk of blood clots from a Covid vaccination. People are panicked by a one-in-several-million risk of clots, but these same people don’t think twice about getting in a car.
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If anyone wants to listen in to the ACIP meeting (which is reviewing the data from J&J) its going on now!
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The deaths with Pfizer have a different clinical picture – it’s a combination of CVST + thrombocytopenia, whereas the data about clotting you’re citing for Pfizer do not include that combination. The US has been looking at the data and have not found any difference in incidence between Pfizer and Moderna vs. clotting, with tens of millions of people vaccinated. Also keep in mind there were two cases in the J&J trial which was an “early” signal of this, so the committees were already on the lookout for clotting issues.
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Here are some key slides that seems to me pretty clearly to suggest it’s tied to the vaccines:
Key here is that data is comparing the risk ratio for JUST CVST, not with low platelets (thrombocytopenia); that combination is so rare they can’t even calculate the baseline incidence rate in the absence of this vaccination program.
My guess is they’re going to preclude this for 50-and-under women. This is a very rare side effect, but a huge increase from what the baseline is. And of the six they’re studying (it’s now 9), 2 were discharged home, 2 are in ICU, 1 hospitalized and 1 has died.
Other information: Of the six women (18-48) 3 women were obese, 1 was hypothyroid, 1 had asthma, 1 was on oral birth control and one had hypertension (not sure how it all shakes out, if one person had multiple conditions, etc.).
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Women seem to be the common denominator in serious side effects with all the Covid vaccines, I wonder what it will take to improve this in vaccines, and is there something special about these vaccines, or have women always born the brunt of the serious side effects.
Well, but one 25-year-old man in the J&J trial developed CVST with immune thrombocytopenia that was initially negative, then after vaccination tested positive for these anti-PF-4 antibodies, so presumably it’s not only women. And the AstraZeneca has not specifically been women (it’s predominantly been women but apparently women made up the majority of early vacinees in those countries, both because it was healthcare workers and because of the age requirements for vaccination limited it to older and thus more female populations)
They just voted to basically do nothing, they want to reconvene with more data to see if they can get better pictures of the risk groups and the actual “numerator” and “denominator” on this. I guess only half of the people vaccinated thus far would be expected to show this side effect yet. They’re also wondering whether there are other cases of thrombocytopenia without CVST that they might be missing. And another person raised the possibility that in older cohorts, this could be happening but perhaps misdiagnosed as an ordinary stroke, which is so much more common. So basically, they just don’t know how common this is yet, and in what populations.
Also, apparently getting this anti-PF4 antibody test is difficult, even in hospitals, and takes 48 hours and if you now have to test every person who has the nonspecific symptom of new onset headache for this antibody you’re talking about a lot of people trying to get this random and difficult test.
Anyways, it just goes to show how complex this decision making all is. But the end result is they’re stretching out the pause and allowing vaccine hesitancy and conspiracy theories to fester, in my opinion. They should have made a recommendation to either limit to some subgroups or put a black box warning and reconvened without the pause.
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Not joking but that’s particularly difficult to untangle currently since people are just reporting that they’re whatever gender they identify with these days. So with a sample of millions of people it’s not as black and white as it used to be
I wish that I had got the JnJ vaccine. It’s one shot, so then it is done; with the Moderna vaccine I got I have another shot on April 29 and given comments on another thread in this forum I have a chance of a severe reaction to the shot.
It certainly won’t surprise me if COVID-19 vaccines are associated with a higher rate of rare blood clotting/low platlet reactions; they are vaccines - they do not directly attack the virus, rather they train, or prep, our own immune systems to attack not the virus but our own cells infected by the virus. Given that COVID-19 has been known for 12 months to be associated with significant instances of blood clotting it would be really strange if the vaccines were not.
So I got an mRNA virus which, rather than simulating the virus, viruslike persuades our cells to produce something that simulates the viurs. And I have to take two doses of the damned stuff before, two weeks later, I am certifiably immunized.
So if an mRNA vaccine has a lower incidence of reactions that correspond to reactions to COVID-19 then it isn’t as good a mimic of the virus as a viral-vector vaccine that shows more of those reactions. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. mRNA vaccines may, indeed, confer immunity while avoiding many of the side effects of full exposure to the virus. Presumably we will know in 10 years time, when I am 71 and writing my memoir, “How the world was destroyed by [politics deleted] while we whined about everything else.”
From my point of view I want the vaccine that is least likely to kill me and, compared with no vaccine, at this moment that means every vaccine by a long, long way.
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Is there really a good option? We say nothing and then the article in the NY Times would be “Western Nations hiding Vaccine concerns from the impoverished world”… or we quietly stop using the Vaccine “Western Nations sending dangerous Vaccines to the impoverished world”…there’s a number of ways this could be written and non would be positive.
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Women, especially pre-menopausal women, just have more robust immune reactivity in general. It’s why women have much higher rates of many auto-immune diseases, and possibly why men are more at risk for some infections including COVID. It’s a double-edged sword–heightened immune responses are great, until they cross the threshold where suddenly not so much.
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Interesting, you learn something new every day. Perhaps I shouldn’t have stopped taking biology classes after high school.
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It’s really not though–anyone looking into something like this with any depth is obviously going to ascertain sex assigned at birth as well as gender and whether someone is on HRT. Researchers are capable of handling it perfectly well. In many cases, someone’s gender may be more relevant than sex assigned at birth anyway, since someone who is trans and has medically transitioned and is on HRT may have more similarity biologically, as far as immune response and vaccines go, to cis people of the same gender than they do to others of the same sex assigned at birth.
Also it was never as black and white as you think it was. Intersex people are as common as redheaded people.
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Also–do we as a forum have standards about not using transphobic language? I would hope that we would want to be a welcoming place for trans and genderqueer diabetics, as we would want to be for diabetics of any other demographic, and statements like “people are just reporting that they’re whatever gender they identify with these days” signal the exact opposite.
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In my mind we should be a “no phobia” community…whatever it is.
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Nothing I said in any way was even remotely phobic of anyone. That’s ridiculous.
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You don’t get to decide what is or is not offensive to marginalized groups. Just because you don’t realize that what you said was problematic, doesn’t mean it isn’t. As someone who is part of the LGBTQ community and specializes in working with LGBTQ+ folks, let me tell you, what you said is hostile and unwelcoming to trans people, as well as invalidating, whether you meant it or not. If you don’t want to be transphobic, my advice would be to either significantly educate yourself about gender identity and how to talk about it respectfully first, or until then, maybe just don’t talk about it, because it probably isn’t a necessary comment for you to make.
I suspect the studies @Chris was referring too are the clinical studies, where the assessment of gender is carried out by the first party, the person doing the study. Of course that introduces a bias that is not visible; remember those studies of cranial dimension? Not as black and white as it used to be.
The problem is both more and less subtle than it appears; more subtle because modern researchers are at least slightly aware of the biases that can readily be introduced by asking the wrong question, less subtle because whatever may have been taught by scientists like Kinsey it still remains the case that small amounts of data prove nothing.
Chris’s impression mirrors my own; COVID-19 vaccine responses seem to more frequently result in people identified as female (identified by the practioner, not the person). People so identified tend to have a greater lifespan, tend to have had children (a serious medical issue that doesn’t go away once the cord is cut), tend to have had major hormonal changes. All of these are causes of poor health, particularly (and ironically; think about it) the greater lifespan.
So I disagree with Chris; the highest common factor has not yet been identified and femininity is not a candidate, most likely there will be several and, most likely (and I hope), they will be identified. Yet I have to step back and reflect that this will be defined by the virus; a simple sequence of very simple chemicals, not by us.