Herainestold wrote: ↑Mon Feb 07, 2022 6:01 pm
Sir John Bell is hardly a disinterested party with respect to the AZ vaccine.
It does pose a small risk, that risk was identified, and health authorities reacted. Whether the reaction was exactly right and what the consequences of that reaction were, is another question.
In the UK and Europe AZ was replaced by mRNA vaccines, so it would be difficult to put a number on the number who died because of the interruptiopn of the vaccine program, but I doubt it was thousands.
Sir John might be referring to the lack of uptake of the AZ vax in the developing world, because of the publicity given to the blood clotting problems.
he may have a case there.
I personally was happy to get AZ and also happy to get a Pfizer booster.
I was happy to get AZ because it meant jumping the age-based queue, and I was happy to get my Pfizer booster in November.
Vaccination rollouts in the EU were generally somewhat behind the UK, but it was the strategy of various countries in the EU of giving AZ to younger people because of doubts about its efficacy in older people which led to the discovery of the clotting problem fairly quickly.
If it had been immediately included in everyone's age-based rollouts I don't know how much faster things would have gone overall, since the doses just weren't arriving. The first batch of a quarter-million AZ doses arrived in Italy almost exactly a year ago (on the 11th of February) when 3.3 million Pfizer doses had already arrived since the beginning of the year and had mainly been giving to people working in the health service and their friends and anyone else who managed to get hold of the google sheet link.
viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1982&start=75#p70122
At that time, the UK had already given a first dose to more than 20% of its eligible population, but Italy was only just about to
start its age-based rollout.
I got my first AZ dose in mid March, by which time about half a million AZ doses had arrived (versus 9 million Pfizer doses) but Lombardy's age-based rollout was still stuck in the over-80's and basically being a f.cking pile of sh.t because the moron friends of the regional administration were in charge of it; when the Post Office took over it improved a lot. About 5 million of us had had a first dose by then. Indeed it seems like most of the EU was at about 7-8% of first-dose coverage when the UK was already at about 35% (
OWID).
(
Cases and
deaths in the same period in the same random selection of countries.)