Thought experiment:
(But you have to promise to read this all the way through. It's not too long. Promise?)
What if I told you that individuals who received the AZ-Ox vaccine were reported to have pancreatitis, and miscarriage, AND six people had appendicitis, seven had...
1/
muscular weakness, and 37 had tingling and numbness?
Would it make you nervous about getting it?
Of course it would!
First question you might logically ask is "well, out of how many people?"...if this was, say, in a group of 100 people, that would seen pretty alarming...
2/
(out of about 12000 people as it happens)
But what does that MEAN?
These happened to vaccine recipients followed closely in a trial. Now, if you take 23000 people, only half of whom got the vaccine, and watch them for 6 months plus, a bunch of people will have health events
3/
because...life. That's like a small city of people, and medical people can confirm - things are always happening to people.
The real question is: did anything happen MORE to people who got a COVID-19 vaccine?
In those examples - 1 of each in the vaccine group and control
4/
group had pancreatitis, and a miscarriage. There were 6 appendicitis cases in the vaccine group and 5 in the control group. There were however 7 muscular weakness cases in the vaccine group but 9 in the control group, and 37 vaccine versus 48 control tingling and numbness
5/
Overall there were serious adverse events in 0.7% of the vaccine group and 0.8% of the control group, as it happens.
So the issue is, we are trying to vaccinate everybody against COVID-19. We will see reports and hear stories of bad things occurring after vaccination, but...
6/
they have to be framed as part of a whole picture, and tracked carefully. The bottom line, is this more than we'd EXPECT as a baseline rate? Is there a pattern of concern? And then weigh that evidence against the risk of not getting vaccine.
7/
So that's it.
Let's preimmunize ourselves against overreacting to decontextualized vaccination -health event issues, so we know what to look for as information comes in. Life is stressful enough already.
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