Astrazeneca jab batch suspended in Austria after death of nurse

[allchildrengrowup]

www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-austria-nurse-idUSKBN2AZ0AO

This news has spooked me a bit. I'm really not trying to scaremonger, but I was diagnosed with a pulmonary embolism three weeks ago and am booked in for my Astrazeneca jab on Wednesday. Apparently the nurse died of severe coagulation disorders and a second nurse who received a dose from the same batch developed a pulmonary embolism.

I know that millions have now had the jab and these events are extremely rare (and prior to having the embolism I wouldn't have been worried at all), but I'm still feeling a bit nervous and wonder if I should ask my GP if I can switch to the Pfizer instead? Or am I being ridiculous?

Excerpt from the article:

“Currently there is no evidence of a causal relationship with the vaccination,” BASG said.

Austrian newspaper Niederoesterreichische Nachrichten as well as broadcaster ORF and the APA news agency reported that the women were both nurses who worked at the Zwettl clinic.

BASG said blood clotting was not among the known side effects of the vaccine. It was pursuing its investigation vigorously to completely rule out any possible link.

“As a precautionary measure, the remaining stocks of the affected vaccine batch are no longer being issued or vaccinated,” it added.

To put it another way - they don’t think the vaccine has anything to do with these incidents - but because they both happened after vaccination, they are going to investigate thoroughly. So as a PRECAUTION, they have suspended that batch. If there is a problem, it is with that batch, not with AZ in general.

The article says there is no causal link. You should not be worried.

Yes, writing from Austria and this was all over the tabloids yesterday. However the two most reputable news sources (ORF and Der Standard, comparable to the BBC and The Guardian) have not reported the story at all. There's no doubt it happened but they are probably waiting for more conclusive evidence before putting out risky headlines that imply a correlation where there may not be one.

That said, the incident is odd because TWO nurses from the same clinic fell ill with the same symptoms shortly after their vaccine. The rural hospital Zwettl is also very small compared to the major ones in cities. The chances of it happening due to two unrelated underlying health conditions is absolutely tiny, although of course, not impossible.

That specific batch of AZ has been halted (6000 doses left) however 36,000 were already given to people without any adverse effects. It seems like they are more concerned about mistakes made in administration or storage rather than the vaccine itself. Surely more cases in the UK would have come to light if the vaccine really was that risky, and it can't be possible that such a serious event only happened twice in a tiny village in Austria.

As you say, the batch has been suspended.

And a causal link is being searched for.

With over 20 million vaccinations in UK, we have not seen recipients dropping like flies.

But we have seen hospitalisations and deaths dropping dramatically.

Edit: Sorry just noticed that ORF did report it but only today in relation to the AZ batch being halted and the story is buried fairly low down. There was nothing on the front page about it yesterday so they clearly want to avoid sensationalising it.

The link is temporal, i.e. something happened after the vaccination - the time interval isn't mentioned.

The vaccines have been given to several million people. If you assess the odds of something bad happening within a window of time after the injection for THIS number of people, eventually you are going to get two bad events happening in the same locale.

It's like playing the lottery - if you buy enough tickets, you're guaranteed to win.

If they are 2 nurses from the same place they could have sided from the same thing but totally unrelated to the vaccine I would have thought.

*died

This has spooked me too. I was so looking forward to my first jab on Saturday and now after reading this I can't pretend I'm not concerned. I have a history of blood clots and have spent the past 20 years doing everything I can to avoid it happening again. I'm 99.9 % sure it will be AV vaccine as it is at a community centre in the village I live in.

I'm finding this concerning also. I had the AZ vaccine on Friday and am more than a little worried about this news.

My grandad died a few years ago, and in the days leading up to his death he DISTINCTLY ate ham salad, battenberg cake, shrimp pate sandwiches and other foods.

Clearly these foods cause MEGADEATH and should be banned immediately.

If two people from the same place died at the same time after eating the same brand of ham, I suspect that ham would be scrutinized, as it should be.

You are scaremongering though because there is no link.

Sometimes people do die of other things!

@notrub

The link is temporal, i.e. something happened after the vaccination - the time interval isn't mentioned.

The vaccines have been given to several million people. If you assess the odds of something bad happening within a window of time after the injection for THIS number of people, eventually you are going to get two bad events happening in the same locale.

It's like playing the lottery - if you buy enough tickets, you're guaranteed to win.

This is what I was going to say (although probably not as eloquently as you )

@Kokeshi123

My grandad died a few years ago, and in the days leading up to his death he DISTINCTLY ate ham salad, battenberg cake, shrimp pate sandwiches and other foods.

Clearly these foods cause MEGADEATH and should be banned immediately.

Be aware of the deadly battenberg cake, I have now disposed of mine, thanks for the headsup :)

It says that they have suspended the use of that batch so they are obviously concerned that there could be a link to the deaths.

I have severe health anxiety and was hesitant about having the vaccine but went ahead, now I'm really scared.

An embolism can be caused by an air bubble, it's very rare and usually people injecting drugs themselves. I would have thought they'd look at the vaccinator rather than the vaccine for this, but pausing that batch to check it seems sensible too.

If I get a thousand pebbles, colour fifty of them red, throw all thousand up in the air and let them land randomly, chances are I'll find some of the red pebbles weirdly close together. This is probably the same thing but on a much bigger scale. Our brains have evolved to find patterns and meaning and detect threats, and a brain that occasionally mistakes a coincidence for a danger will survive a lot better than a brain that occasionally mistakes a danger for a coincidence. We've ended up biased towards seeing meaning in randomness, and danger in meaning. And no matter how much maths you do to show that something was a random coincidence, it'll still feel like it's meaningful, even when you know it's not.

It's possible I guess that there was some kind of problem with this batch, but you won't be given a dose from it. But if you'd feel better asking for the Pfizer jab, there's no harm done except maybe having to wait longer?

I won't be get the astra-zeneca vaccine and neither is my family. I'm completely in favour of vaccines but the reality is that this particular one seem to have to many side effects and issues.

We had a good family chat about vaccines last week and we all agreed that if we lived in Europe or UK we probably would. As it is, living in Australia and with zero transmission, we don't want to risk the side effects. We will wait until we can choose what vaccines we put in our bodies.

Tens of millions have had the vaccination, millions are getting it every day. By the law of averages you'll get the odd case like this.

An embolism can be caused by an air bubble, it's very rare and usually people injecting drugs themselves. I would have thought they'd look at the vaccinator rather than the vaccine for this, but pausing that batch to check it seems sensible too.

That's only true of intravenous injections. Vaccines aren't given intravenously they're given into the muscle so an air bubble could not have caused the embolism in this case.

The MHRA has the reported yellow card data for the U.K.

www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-adverse-reactions/coronavirus-vaccine-summary-of-yellow-card-reporting

“As of 21 February 2021, for the UK:

29,715 Yellow Cards have been reported for the Pfizer/BioNTech
42,917 have been reported for the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine
177 have been reported where the brand of the vaccine was not specified

For both vaccines the overall reporting rate is around 3 to 5 Yellow Cards per 1,000 doses administered.

The MHRA has received 212 UK reports of suspected ADRs to the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine in which the patient died shortly after vaccination, 244 reports for the Oxford University/AstraZeneca vaccine and 4 where the brand of vaccine was unspecified. The majority of these reports were in elderly people or people with underlying illness. Usage of the AstraZeneca has increased rapidly and as such, so has reporting of fatal events with a temporal association with vaccination however, this does not indicate a link between vaccination and the fatalities reported. Review of individual reports and patterns of reporting does not suggest the vaccine played a role in the death.”

donotfeedthebears I don't really understand all the data in your post apart from that there appears to have been a number of deaths after both vaccines. I had AZ on Friday and now I am utterly terrified that I am going to die from it (severe health anxiety) I feel like I made a huge mistake by having it.

It just means that of the tens of millions of people who have had the vaccine, there are cases where people have died at some point in the time following.

But if you just took tens of millions of people on any given day, vaccine or no, the chances that some would die that day are high. It doesn't mean it was from the vaccine. It's just that with that number of people, you are going to get incidences of things happening that don't happen terribly often. And because people are actively looking for connections, they assume that it must be because of the vaccine. Vaccine makers are being ultra ultra cautious, so they will investigate every possibility, even when it's nothing to do with that.

Imagine how strange it would be if tens of millions of people had a vaccine, and nobody died that day. It would be hailed as a miracle cure for everything, because realistically, some people are going to die of random things on a particular day, regardless of what they did or didn't do.

There probably have been some really good but very rare things that happened to people on the day they had the vaccine as well. Those aren't reported or investigated, because it's not what people are worrying about or looking for.

You've done the right thing by having the vaccine, and have reduced your own chances of dying and reduced the chances of those around you, which is definitely positive. Feel proud that you've played a small part in ending this!

I agree with others. It maybe that specific batch or the vaccinator