As I understand it, the Australian government is going ahead with the AstraZeneca vaccine for those over 50 years, while other vaccines will be used for the rest of the population. This is due to the blood clot issue, apparently thought, but not proven, to be due to an immune response. The risk of dying is 1 in 800,000, which is a bit hard to conceptualise. What is the risk of dying from Covid-11111119999999…, surely less isn’t it? Anyway, Denmark has banned the AstraZeneca vaccine as discussed below. Here is material I could find on the issue in relevant bite-size pieces, to bring the reader up to speed, because this is certainly not in the Australian press. Read it all here!
“On Tuesday’s broadcast of CNN’s “AC360,” Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy said that we’re “trying to figure out” whether the blood clots among six people who have received the Johnson and Johnson coronavirus vaccine are actually related to the vaccine, and that another reason for the pause of the administration of the J&J vaccine is to get help from medical professionals in “looking for the kind of symptoms we may be concerned about and then have them report it.”
Murthy said, “[W]hat we are trying to figure out right now is whether these unfortunate cases of clots are, in fact, related to the vaccine itself.”
Murthy said, “So, the reason to pause, Anderson, there are a couple of reasons: One is to do the investigation quickly, to understand whether there’s a connection between the vaccine and the adverse events. But there’s another reason as well to pause, which is to give us time to speak to the medical community, to doctors, nurses, and others who are taking care of patients so we can enlist their help in looking for the kind of symptoms we may be concerned about and then have them report it.”
https://www.theepochtimes.com/pentagon-halts-usage-of-covid-19-to-military-official_3774352.html
“The Department of Defense (DOD) said it is halting the administration of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to military members after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recommended the move, citing rare blood clots.
“At the recommendation of the FDA and CDC, the Department of Defense is immediately pausing the use of the J&J vaccine,” DOD press secretary John Kirby said in a statement on Tuesday.
A number of states have halted using the J&J vaccine against the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus after the CDC and FDA recommendations earlier in the day. Federal officials said they didn’t find rare blood clots among the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine recipients.
“The safety of our force and their families is a top priority for the Department. We are communicating this pause to our military health facilities and are reviewing our global vaccine distribution to address this issue and ensure we can continue to provide vaccines to our DoD population at home and abroad,” Kirby said.
Johnson & Johnson told news outlets that it would delay rollout of the vaccine to Europe, a week after regulators there said they were reviewing rare blood clots in four recipients of the shot in the United States.
FDA official Peter Marks said it was “plainly obvious” the J&J cases were “very similar” to the AstraZeneca ones.
However, officials said there had been no similar blood clot cases reported among recipients of the Moderna or Pfizer/BioNTech vaccines, which use a different mRNA technology.
The White House said the J&J vaccine pause would not have a “significant” impact on its plan to administer about three million shots per day and a total of 200 million before President Joe Biden’s 100th day in office.
Meanwhile, officials said that about 40 percent of U.S. Marines have declined to get vaccinated.
“We fully understand that widespread acceptance of the COVID-19 vaccine provides us with the best means to defeat this pandemic. The key to addressing this pandemic is building vaccine confidence,” said Woods, according to USA Today.
“The Navy and Marine Corps are providing substantial educational information broadly, and working with commands to ensure Marines, Sailors, and beneficiaries have accurate information regarding the safety and efficacy of the vaccines to encourage individuals to get immunized,” Woods said.
Johnson & Johnson said in response that the “safety and well-being of people who use our products” is the company’s number one priority, adding it is aware of an “extremely rare disorder involving people with blood clots in combination with low platelets in a small number of individuals who have received our COVID-19 vaccine.”
The firm added it’s “reviewing these cases with European health authorities,” and it had “made the decision to proactively delay the rollout of our vaccine in Europe.”
“The anti-vaxxers say the China Virus vaccine is useless, and therefore there’s no good reason to take the risk in getting it.
Well, here’s Fauci basically saying the same thing…
So, if you’re not vaccinated, please get vaccinated as soon as vaccine becomes available to you, and if you are vaccinated, please remember that you still have to be careful and not get involved in crowded situations, particularly indoors where people are not wearing masks. And for the time being, until we show definitively that a person who’s vaccinated does not get this subclinical infection and can spread to others, you should also continue to wear a mask.
He added “it’s still not OK” to eat or drink indoors.
What the hell is the point of getting vaccinated if nothing changes? Even after being vaccinated, I still can’t gather with people? You’re still going to enforce capacity limits? I still have to wear this goddamned mask? I still can’t enjoy a meal or a beer indoors, or go to a movie?
Why in the world would I get vaccinated if it does no good? At least to my ears, that’s Fauci’s message here. And…
This is precisely what the anti-vaxxers keep telling me!
On Tuesday, Fauci doubled down.
CNNLOL former-journalist Wolf Blitzer asked him, “Should I feel — I’m fully vaccinated, obviously, should I feel safe having dinner at an indoor restaurant?” Here’s Fauci’s lunatic response:
[B]eing vaccinated, the risk for you is very low. It isn’t like before when you were not vaccinated and you had a lot of activity in the community and you went into an indoor restaurant where there was not [a] restriction on the number of people in a restaurant. Your risk would be up there. Whereas, now, the risk is not zero, but it’s extremely low. And what it’s going to be, Wolf, is that people are going to have to make a determination of what level of risk are they willing to take.
So why not tell us what the risk is? If the vaccine moves the risk from “up there” to “very low,” what does that mean? The coronavirus survival rate, if you’re under 70, is already somewhere between 99.5 percent and 99.997 percent. Could the move from “up there” to “very low” take us into flu survival rate territory? And if so, doesn’t that mean that those of us who have been vaccinated can go back to living a normal life?
Sadly, that’s the least of Fauci’s madness…
What a banner day Tuesday must have been for the anti-vaxxers when Fauci and His Fraudulency Joe Biden decided to pull the Johnson & Johnson vaccine off the shelves … over six instances of blood-clotting and a single death. Some seven million people have received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which puts the risk way below the acceptable level.”
“The federal government is looking to states and territories to set up mass vaccination centres and may need to use state hospital hubs to help vaccinate aged care and disability workers as it goes back to the drawing board to work out how to complete its COVID-19 vaccination program.
Many of the 318,000 workers in the aged care and disability sector who were in line to get the AstraZeneca vaccine would now need to get the Pfizer vaccine after the Australian Technical Group on Immunisation recommended it should become the preferred vaccine for people aged under 50.
The sector said state hospital hubs should be used to ensure those workers could receive a Pfizer vaccine.
The approach raises urgent questions about costs because the states carry the burden of the mass vaccination sites, while the federal government pays for doses given by general practitioners, and Labor has accused the government of “passing the buck” after bungling its rollout.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison conceded on Wednesday that the vaccine rollout had experienced difficulties and outlined his intention to work with states and territories on a plan for mass vaccination clinics to ensure all Australians could be protected by the end of the year, as the bulk of the 40 million Pfizer doses were set to arrive in the last quarter.
In a speech in Perth, Mr Morrison said he would work with states and territories to find the best method for mass vaccination as soon as new doses of the vaccine become available.
He aired the ambition to vaccinate all Australians by the end of the year as long as the country received imported doses promised by Pfizer and local vaccines produced by CSL under an alliance with AstraZeneca.
Victorian Acting Premier James Merlino has launched mass vaccination sites, such as at the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton and the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre, to inoculate health workers, police and other front-line workers. He said the state was ready and willing to support the Commonwealth with the vaccine rollout.”
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-09/covid-vaccine-astrazeneca-blood-clots-over-50-safe/100057540
“Australia's health advice has changed to preference the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine over AstraZeneca's for a large portion of the country's population.
With the government accepting advice that the small risk of blood clots associated with the AstraZeneca vaccine means it should not be given to people under 50, its plan to vaccinate Australians against the virus is in disarray.
But if you're wondering what it means for you, or whether it's still safe to take the AstraZeneca vaccine, read on to see what the expert advice is saying. You can also jump to your question here:
The AstraZeneca vaccine remains approved for use in Australia.
The risk of developing blood clots has been associated with the vaccine by some medical bodies, but the risk of this happening in an individual case is extremely small.
The rare new illness that has caused this scare has been given a name by Australia's vaccines advisory group: Thrombosis with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome, or TTS.
It describes when someone develops a blood clot with the number of platelets in their blood dropping.
The advice to government notes the condition has been seen in a small number of people who have received the AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe, and one person in Australia is also suspected to have developed TTS after getting the shot.
Studies have suggested TTS affects four to six people per million vaccinations, or somewhere in the realm of one in every 200,000 people.
Expert advice that led to the Government's decision says about 25 per cent of people who develop TTS die, which means at the current rate, roughly one person per 800,000 given AstraZeneca's vaccine can be expected to die from TTS.
Why is the vaccine OK for people over 50?
The government says it's taking a deliberately cautious approach by changing tack on the rollout strategy.
It says it can do this because Australia has such low rates of community transmission, which reduces the urgent need to vaccinate the entire population.
But the risks of TTS — and COVID-19 — differ depending on your age.
Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly explained it appeared that because the rare syndrome was likely an immune response, it had a greater chance of affecting young people with "robust" immune systems.
And, as we know, your risk of death or hospitalisation from COVID-19 increases the older you are.
"This is based both on the increased risk of complications from COVID-19 with increasing age, and thus increased benefit of the vaccination, and the potentially lower — but not zero — risk of this rare event with increasing age," Professor Kelly said.
In a nutshell, the government believes the AstraZeneca vaccine contains fewer risks and greater benefits for older people, and therefore is worth the very small risk associated with the vaccine for people over 50.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/denmark-permanently-bans-astrazeneca-jab-over-blood-clots
“As the US's decision to discontinue the Johnson & Johnson vaccine provokes a new scrutiny for all vaccines based on adenovirus-vector platform, Denmark, one of the most critical countries in Europe when it comes to vaccine safety, has just declared that it will permanently ban AstraZeneca's coronavirus vaccine following a safety review.
The decision to ban the jab was taken after it was reportedly linked to several serious reactions involving blood clots and bleeding in patients with low blood platelet counts, according to Berlingske.
The vaccine was originally put on hold on March 11 when a 60-year-old Danish woman died shortly after receiving the vaccine. She died with a very unique disease picture, where she was both affected by internal bleeding, a very low platelet count and blood clots. Roughly three dozen similar cases have been reported across the EU.
Cerebral blood clots were characterized as a very rare side effect, the result of random immune system reactions to the adenovirus jabs - or at least that's what a team of doctors suggested yesterday.
Both the WHO and the EMA have repeatedly maintained that the benefits of using the corona pandemic vaccine outweigh the risks,though the EMA has acknowledged that there's a possibility of a connection between the vaccines and the rare reactions, which have now been documented in patients who received the AstraZeneca jab, and the J&J jab.
Yesterday, Dr. Peter Marks said US regulators were looking more closely at the adenovirus platform, which was used by AstraZeneca, J&J and Russia's "Sputnik V" jab.
Denmark and Norway had maintained the pause to examine the vaccine further. But now the authorities in Denmark have decided that there's enough evidence to permanently suspend the vaccine in their country.
The decision will have a significant impact on the timeline of Denmark's vaccine rollout, with officials estimating on Wednesday that it could take an extra three months to the vaccinate the entire population.
Meanwhile, in the EU, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen proclaimed that the Continent has reached 100M vaccinations, a milestone made possible by a recent acceleration in the pace of the Continent's rollout.