Now 79 cases of AZ-related blood clots in the U.K. and 19 deaths *title edited by MNHQ at OP's request*

[Boringlynormal]

How have we gone - in the past 10 days - from:

5 cases - all men
To
30 cases, 7 deaths
To
79 cases and 19 deaths, 2/3 of them are women.

What the hell is going on?!

Yes I know it’s still low compared to overall number than have had the vaccine but that’s not reassuring when they don’t seem to have had a clue about the numbers and let us all continue getting the vaccine with no warning even when Europe was sounding huge alarm bells.

I’m 12 days post AZ, mid 30s and very upset.

I know you are very anxious about this. However, it is extremely rare and from the EMA's website, you'd be expected to experience any adverse symptoms within the first two weeks after the vaccination. You're nearly past that. There are a list of symptoms to watch out for as well. The problems are extremely rare. Remember that.

Most of the cases reported so far have occurred in women under the age of 60 years. Most cases occurred within 2 weeks of the person receiving their first dose.

www.ema.europa.eu/en/news/astrazenecas-covid-19-vaccine-ema-finds-possible-link-very-rare-cases-unusual-blood-clots-low-blood

This is scary as my mum and great grandma died from this specific blood clot years ago. My sister has had this vaccine and is worried and doesn't want to get the second one.

@Namechange1991x are these blood issues hereditary then?

Apologies if this has already been mentioned but isn’t the clotting risk higher in the pill than the AZ vaccine? Did those under 30 bat an eyelid at taking it?

Certainly in my 30’s when taking the pill I knew of the blood clot risk but it was so tiny i never gave it a seconds thought.

@ineedaholidaynow I don't know if you can test for this specific blood clot, but when my mum died my sisters and I were checked for blood clotting disorders, which can be hereditary. I was 15, so can't remember what exactly. We were told we were fine and have as 'much risk as the general population'. I have always taken that with a pinch of salt, because what are the chances two women on my maternal side have both died from this supposedly rate condition, without there being some genetic link.

Also I never took the pill despite GPs always saying it'd be fine...that was really concerning.

@AlohaMolly

Our government messed the handling of the pandemic up so badly that the only chance we have is a vaccine. It stands to reason that it is in the governments interest to push vaccination more than perhaps they would have had they handled it better.

I don’t agree that the government’s handling of the pandemic, as dodgy as it has been, is the reason why the vaccine is the way out. I think the vaccine just is the way out.

How could a country like the UK, which is a major international travel hub, contain Covid without vaccination (long-term, I mean)? Test, trace, isolate and quarantine - could all have been done better. It would have made a massive difference, for example, for the government cover the wages of people required to self-isolate after a positive test or close contact with one. That would make a massive difference to people being unwilling to test because they need to work.

But, long term, if we want society and the economy to work anything like normally, we have to vaccinate.

kat many of us didn’t take the pill actually, for this and many other reasons

I have the kind of brain that doesn’t listen to experts easily

The pill is also linked to various deficiencies in certain multi nutrients such as zinc but you won’t hear that when you are given it either

What I don’t understand is that we’ve been told again and again that these vaccines are safe - tried and thoroughly tested! They’re NOT an experiment. Not in any way ...

Yet this blood clotting thing is a surprise to all the scientists. What other long or shot term side effects will surprise them? What else do they not expect or know?

How can this be called anything other than an experiment?

@Dustyboots And worse anyone who has expressed any concerns over having it has been labelled as a selfish anti vaxxer

@Dustyboots it's only when a vaccine (or any drug) is rolled out to millions of people can these rare side effects be found out about.

All of those shouting (rightly) about logic and risk, I still feel there is an unaddressed elephant in the room. Thus far there is sufficient concern the AZ that an alternative should be used for under 30s if possible (which to me screams of cop out language to avoid the fall out of formally banning it). But there is no magic step change at 30, it's probably a continuum on a sliding scale the same as it probably is for the Covid risks, it's just the data has been analysed and cut off at under 30.

But the elephant is this - what about the other vaccines? With the best available data at this point in time, the other vaccines are "safer" for want of a better term. Why is it acceptable to just swallow the stats and take ones chances with AZ? Why aren't you all standing up and saying 'no thanks, we should be having one of the others'?

I'd be particularly keen to hear from females aged 30-50 who have not yet had any vaccine. So far much of what I've seen on other threads has been initial data and then it's been revealed 'but as a medic/carer/with x condition I've personally already had Pfizer'. Not overly helpful.

@Namechange1991x,
I don't know if you can test for this specific blood clot

this link has been posted a few times.

It’s the current guidance to detect and treat this specific blood clot.

b-s-h.org.uk/media/19512/guidance-version-10-on-mngmt-of-thrombosis-with-thrombocytopenia-occurring-after-c-19-vaccine_20210401.pdf

www.theguardian.com/business/2021/apr/07/astrazeneca-vaccine-scientists-set-for-22m-payday-in-new-york-float

Interesting

@Lemonandlime123

Can anyone explain to me how/why the vaccine would cause a blood clot?

It's not the vaccine in itself its the bodies immune response that causes it. I don't know if that means that those who got clots would have been likely to be more ill / get c.ots with actual covid. I presume it's being looked at.

"
That's not how I remember it. Back in January I said that as a slim healthy 32-year-old, I was slightly unsure about taking a brand new vaccine and was glad I'm not at the top of the list because I'd rather wait and see how it all plays out.

I was told by many, MANY people that I was stupid and a science denier. That the phase III trials were absolutely conclusive that there is NO risk."

This.

@ineedaholidaynow

So it is an experiment.

"There is no medication which has ever been produced which doesn't have some side effects for some people. Sometimes they are serious, even fatal. But if a medication is approved for use, that means that on the basis of all available information, the benefit outweighs the risk."

A vaccine is not medication. Anyone who compared the vaccine to medication was told that all the time e.g. when talking about Thalidomide.

Do you take any medication @Dustyboots?

@Parker231

If you get a new prescription from your doctor, do you read the leaflet with all the possible side effects? They can sometimes run to a small book. The only time I read the leaflet was for the malaria tablets - the side effects listed covered everything from a mild headache to death! If you didn’t take prescriptions because of the very unlikely side effects, you’d never take anything.

I stopped taking the malaria tablets because the side effects were so awful. I should not have been taking them anyway because it was winter in the country I was visiting and no mosquitoes.

"Some people in here seem to have lost all sense of perspective... The chances of dying as a result of the AZ vaccine are literally less than one-in-a-million based on the data.... As a fit 40-something, the chances of my dying if I catch Covid are 100-1,000 times higher!

Deciding not to take the vaccine based on these stats would be complete insanity!

Yes, but those numbers are changing all the time. Up until today we were told it was better for EVERYONE to have the AZ vaccine, now it's only people over 30. What if more cases come to light and advice has to be changed again?

" You'd be literally 30 times more likely to die from a car accident this year (1,842 deaths in 2019), yet I expect none of you give a second thought to that.""

What a strange thing to say. People think very often about the risk of car accidents and we try very hard to avoid them. I cannot avoid crossing the road or occasionally being in a vehicle anyway.

With respect to the vaccine, when people say "I'll wait and see how things pan out" what they are really saying is "I'll wait until a lot of other people have taken a risk that I'm not prepared to take".

Now people are perfectly entitled to assume that position but if everyone did so then we wouldn't actually get anywhere because everyone would just be sitting around waiting for someone else to do something. It doesn't make you some sort of wise sage who realised something that nobody else did.

The point of side effects this rare is that it's not the speed of the vaccine that's the issue with identifying them, it's the numbers. Until you have vaccinated millions and millions of people the side effects (if they are linked to the vaccine) don't show up, precisely because they are very rare. Waiting and watching those people in the trial for longer wouldn't have identified these issues.

I don’t take any medication @ineedaholidaynow

Even for a long term serious chronic problem. My NHS consultant has come up with a care plan where I manage it without medicine.

Similar for whole family.

My family have been mismanaged terribly in the past via shit medicine and it’s side effects. Family members have died. The pill has been mentioned here a lot. It caused one family members death.

I gave zero trust in mainstream medicine.

Apologies if this has been covered but why, if there is a clot risk, are we not advised to take asprin for several days after the jab?

@Dustyboots

That's great for you and I'm sorry you've had negative experiences but without mainstream medicine a lot of people (myself included) would be dead. The fact that mainstream medicine is imperfect and sometimes doesn't get things right doesn't mean that most of the time people generally benefit from medicine and healthcare.

My dad died of sepsis following serious mismanagement of his condition in hospital so I do empathise.