MHRA may change advice for young people receiving AZ vaccine

[IloveSooty424]

I just saw this news story on Channel 4 news tonight.

www.channel4.com/news/uk-medicines-regulator-considers-issuing-new-advice-over-oxford-astrazeneca-jab

It seems the MHRA may follow other European countries and Canada and advise that younger people should not receive the AZ vaccine. It seems the decision will be made imminently in the coming days.

I’m due to book my vaccine this week and don’t know whether to wait and see how this plays out. I’m 42. I’m also concerned that if younger people will only be offered the Pfizer vaccine it will slow down the vaccine programme substantially.

Any thoughts?

@CoffeeDay

Thanks for your link. Very interesting read.

I wonder why more focus is not placed on developing a bog standard whole inactivated virus vaccine by western pharmaceutical companies (similar to what the Chinese have done) - or why can't China submit their Sinopharm vaccine for proper peer review so it can be authorised by FDA/MHRA/EMA

True, the efficacy appears to be not so great (similar to the flu vaccines?) but it could still be useful for the younger population who would like to have a degree of protection?

@MimiPigeon

The biggest risk is actually young people not getting vaccinated and passing Covid around with barely any symptoms, which allows it the opportunity to mutate into something that kills us all. We need to eradicate it by vaccinating everyone.

Mimi, most scientists have said that it is not going to be eradicated. It will be endemic, like flu.

It can mutate in anyone, an unvaccinated child, a pregnant woman, an immunocompromised person (how the b.1.1.7 strain emerged), a vaccinated person who did not develop immunity. It’s a virus, it mutates. We just have to accept that risk and get back to living our lives.

mutations over time are usually weaker
That has not proven to be the case with Covid. New variants are more infectious and are partially evading vaccine protection. If a variant appears that is really infectious and really successful at evading vaccine protection, we’ll be back at square one like March 2020.

@nonono1

BBC news just saying that young people have around the same chance of dying in a car accident every three months as they have from dying from the vaccine ever... yet you don’t see people scared to get in a car.

I am waiting for someone to come on and tell you they never get in a car. So that statistic doesn't apply to them😂

Yes more infectious and less deadly

What do you want to happen? The whole world to be vaccinated every six months forever?

There are bigger things to spend our money on. I can’t believe the waste. Twice weekly LF tests for 60 million? Where will the plastic go? “Well they seemed to survive covid only for their planet to implode in plastic waste in the process”

New variants are more infectious

More infectious usually means less deadly - a deadly virus is a rubbish one because it kills it's host before it gets the chance to pass on, like Ebola.

@Roonerspismed
People don't care. They are so desperate to go back to their old lifestyle, which causes massive climate change and at the same time they call people that don't want to test weekly or get vaccine 'selfish'. Go figure.

I can’t believe the waste

Just like all the discarded masks, testing paraphernalia, gloves and single-use plastic created since this started. Never mind all the bleach, sanitiser and wipes which have now been proven effectively useless, as it's an airborne virus that's barely spread through surface contact. A real deadly pandemic will probably be a super-bacteria that develops as a result of all the antibac.

No, they were looking at the number of doses given to a particular age group, not all doses. The clots were more likely to occur in younger people.

*No they are not more likely to appear in younger people. The information from Europe and the UK all says the likelihood of clots is the same.

The difference with young people is the risk of covid is less. So you have to weigh that up against the possibility of clots.*

@Frustratedbeyondbelief

Drives me mad.. how many young women look at the risk of clots whilst taking the pill ?

Much much higher than the Covid vaccine !!!

What about the pill and then taking the vaccine? I’m on the pill late thirties - are we more at risk ?

More infectious usually means less deadly
The British variant B117 is MORE deadly as well as being more infectious.

www.forbes.com/sites/victoriaforster/2021/03/15/uk-coronavirus-variant-significantly-more-deadly-says-new-study/amp/

The Kent variant that they are talking about is only more deadly because it is more infectious. Therefore more cases equals more deaths. Plus the hospitals get busier and quality of care is made harder. Choices have to be made about ventilation that don't if hospitals are quieter. The Kent variant started in the UK and this is what are data has found.

*our

@vickyp0llard

I can’t believe the waste

Just like all the discarded masks, testing paraphernalia, gloves and single-use plastic created since this started. Never mind all the bleach, sanitiser and wipes which have now been proven effectively useless, as it's an airborne virus that's barely spread through surface contact. A real deadly pandemic will probably be a super-bacteria that develops as a result of all the antibac.

All that polluting waste.... because the government prioritised the polluting air travel industry above all else.

@worriedatthemoment

So do we assume they are looking at the data now for all the other vaccines as well or have their been zero cases with those ?

Similar cases have been reported in the USA associated (I hope that’s a sufficiently vague word) with Pfizer and Moderna, with some deaths (not exactly the same pathology but similar). Obviously the USA has administered way more of these two vaccines than the UK, so if there were rare reactions it was likely they would be picked up there first.

Absolutely no way should AZ be offloaded to poorer countries instead.

I’ve had the AZ vaccine so obviously I don’t regard it as offloading, but why don’t you ask the countries themselves what they would like?

I am frustrated at overuse of the word 'usually' as though we can predict what will happen next - the Brazil P1 variant spreads more easily and is more deadly. It both affects younger people more frequently and with worse outcomes.

Here for data: mobile.twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1378232936399577088

Collectively and individually we need to stop focusing on what we hope is going to happen next and focus on what is actually happening now.

The vaccines are an major piece of this jigsaw but so is isolation (funding) and border control.

UK making the same category of error as in 2020 - complacency and overconfidence. Need a different personality in charge.

Dear Namechange1991,
Do I understand you correctly? Did your mom pass away from a blood clot after vaccination? If so, I am so very sorry for your loss. Would you be open to sharing her symptoms to help us understand what to look out for? Please, take good care of yourself in this horrible situation.

And I don't subscribe to "it's for other people's benefit" - sorry but I don't do medical interventions for other people's benefit. It's quite a coercive argument to guilt-trip people into taking medical treatment to protect others (who should have had the vaccine themselves if they are so vulnerable/concerned).

@vickyp0llard Call it what you want, but I’m having the vaccine primarily to protect my parents and other older people in my family. If you’re not willing to do that for your family then that’s on you, but personally I think it’s selfish and reckless not to have it and knowingly put older people in particular at risk.

They haven't published how many have been vaccinated under 50.

@YoBeaches I’m sure I read a post on Mumsnet a few weeks ago quoting latest NHS stats which showed that 20% of 16-49 year olds have already been vaccinated. Presumably it’s more now. So again, quite a big sample!

Is that 20% with AZ?

@nonono1

And I don't subscribe to "it's for other people's benefit" - sorry but I don't do medical interventions for other people's benefit. It's quite a coercive argument to guilt-trip people into taking medical treatment to protect others (who should have had the vaccine themselves if they are so vulnerable/concerned).

@vickyp0llard Call it what you want, but I’m having the vaccine primarily to protect my parents and other older people in my family. If you’re not willing to do that for your family then that’s on you, but personally I think it’s selfish and reckless not to have it and knowingly put older people in particular at risk.

Were the older people in your family not vaccinated?

@Truelymadlydeeplysomeonesmum

No, they were looking at the number of doses given to a particular age group, not all doses. The clots were more likely to occur in younger people.

*No they are not more likely to appear in younger people. The information from Europe and the UK all says the likelihood of clots is the same.

The difference with young people is the risk of covid is less. So you have to weigh that up against the possibility of clots.*

@Truelymadlydeeplysomeonesmum

“The data suggest there is a slightly higher incidence reported in the younger adult age groups and the MHRA advises that this evolving evidence should be taken into account when considering the use of the vaccine.”

www.gov.uk/government/news/mhra-issues-new-advice-concluding-a-possible-link-between-covid-19-vaccine-astrazeneca-and-extremely-rare-unlikely-to-occur-blood-clots

[quote Truelymadlydeeplysomeonesmum]@jasjas1973 It is a vaccine not a medicine? Also it only stays in your system a few weeks. Just long enough to trigger an immune response to create antibodies blah blah blah. 4 months for long term affect of the vaccine itself is plenty. It is the antibodies longevity, transmission, etc being watched after that. The vaccine is long gone.

You are thankful for something using even newer tech than AZ. So by your logic you should actually be worried sick at this moment.[/quote]
Not at all or my logic - in my DD cohort of HCPs, they all wanted the Pfizer vaccine.

If 4 months monitoring is all that was ever required, why are vaccines usually put in P3 trials that last many years?
Sure you can speed things up in terms of funding etc but you cannot speed up time.

My point on the 4months is that just 3 or 4 weeks ago, the UK had no clotting cases, my friend had AZ on the 17th March (terrible headache that lasted about a week, no one was interested in her) the concern on clotting had only just been mentioned and the govt/mhra closed ranks and denied any such thing.... many on here came out with hysterical rubbish about it being some awful EU plot to get us back for brexit.
Now we have 79 cases, that number is going to go up.

Telegraph interviewed the sister of a 59 year old man who died from this particular clot (she still backed AZ vaccinations, which is truly amazing)
Countries that do have a ban, have one that is around u60's not u30s, why are we, yet again, such an outlier?

Look, we need vaccines but that needs open transparent data and honesty, to me the UK has either tried to hide this stuff OR as i suspect, has a v poor monitoring system.

From BBC News website: "Mr Hancock said the AstraZeneca jab remained safe but if adults under 30 wanted "to have Pfizer or Moderna that's fine".

There is "more than enough of the Pfizer or Moderna vaccine" for the 8.5 million people under 30 who are yet to be vaccinated in the UK to have two doses, he said."

It does feel a little unfair the rest of us don't get a choice in the same way... 8.5 million is the size of the Moderna order so that means the rest of us older than 30 are more likely now to get given AZ than we would have been without this new advice (I had assumed Moderna would start to be given to those next in line in our 40s and 30s).