If your answer is no idea, then I have no idea how you can pass judgement.
It can only seem reasonable if you have some idea of the certainty necessary to make a recommendation to get #2. There is no way to get to reasonable or unreasonable with no opinion on that.
I didnât read the article, but Iâm guessing it is not the Russian one. Thatâs a bad look if you want your citizens to get vaccinated with what I assume is the most widely available vaccine. Itâs not good enough for you, but itâs good enough for them?
Iâm not sure where you are going with this but my gut says that given the existence of other vaccine options that operate using different mechanisms, the threshold for certainty on the part of the doctors should be extremely high and I have strong suspicion that they are misapplying logic because they are all-in on promoting the vaccine and deal with so many idiots and very few people who in fact have a suspected stroke shortly after receiving a shot. I may or may not be in the group of idiots.
So I will say given that other supposedly just as good vaccine options exist, the threshold for doctor certainty here is unlikely to be met and is more a product of their overall understanding of the vaccine and side effects rather than an appropriate adjustment to actual outliers.
But isnât the Russian one like 90 percent effective? Whatâs the reason to not take it if youâre Putin? Itâs legitimately a really good vaccine.
Iâm certain if you asked them, they would tell you that their certainty is indeed extremely high.
Also, if it is thrombotic complications that you are worried about, they are, as you know, in the news because of the AZ vaccine which is a viral vector. JnJ is as well. So your proposed solution relies on her getting a vaccine that as far as we know has a more similar mechanism to the ones getting all the news about thrombotic complications than the one she actually got.
That does seem like an odd solution.
Having said above, I think if you spent an hour and crunched some numbers that are not to difficult to google like:
-thrombotic complications reported after each type of vaccine
-risk of contracting COVID after one shot only
-her age/health adjusted risk of bad outcomes from COVID
-how long she would have to wait to get a different vaccine
You could probably come up with some idea of the magnitude of the risks involved. I doubt the docs who are advising her are doing this, but they probably have an intuitive sense of these factors and thatâs why they are making the recommendation that they are making. Could they be wrong? Absolutely? But given the info they have, itâs not hard to see why they might be so certain.
Russia has 3 vaccines, it could be a case of not wanting to make one seem like itâs better than the others because Putin got it. That seems to be the story CNBC got from them:
Earlier in the day, the Kremlin said it would not reveal the name of the vaccine that Putin would receive, only that it would be one of three Russian-made shots.
âWe are deliberately not saying which shot the president will get, noting that all three Russian vaccines are absolutely reliable and effective,â Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, according to Reuters.
This is the kind of logical error I mean. Itâs not relevant. The relevant fact is that we have someone who experienced this kind of event after a specific vaccine.
We shouldnât have enough data on these people getting a second shot of the same type because this kind of event is extremely rare since if it were not the vaccine would not be used.
I accept the point that perhaps the kind of person who experiences this event is even more likely to have a stroke given a different vaccine.
OK, letâs say someone gets hit by a car after a vaccine. Why shouldnât we withhold vaccine #2 because they might get hit by a car again. After all, the relevant fact is that we have someone who experienced this kind of event after a specific vaccine.
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Itâs not really an assumption. We come to that conclusion based on our knowledge of human biology (and I guess cars) and data that we have.
You should do the same thing for any event that occurs after a vaccination. All we can do is use our knowledge of biology and the data we have.
Now if you want to argue that the rates of reported thrombotic complications is not that important in this specific case, that would be one thing. âNot relevantâ is something else entirely.
Itâs not an assumption. Thereâs a ton of hard data out there in multiple gold standard randomized controlled trials vs placebo. I donât want to go too hard at this because your mom had a stroke. I get it. Iâve seen it too many times. Itâd be nice if there was some easily identifiable reason for it, especially if that reason was easily avoidable in the future instead of something harder like âlose weightâ or âcontrol your diabetesâ or etc.
The fact is that shit happens, and that itâs not fairly distributed or easily explained.
Iâm hopeful your mom didnât have any residual deficits and is on a good path for recovery.
It wasnât my mom. And I accept that my misunderstanding/lack of knowledge regarding this kind of medical event is the issue here. I was thinking anaphylaxis was a better analogy than a car accident, but if there is no chance the vaccine caused the stroke or no increased chance of someone experiencing a second event here, then I accept your position.
I wouldnât say âno chanceâ, just that the chance of it causing it is much lower than the risk of covid. We have a lot of data on the immediate risks of taking the vaccine. If such a risk exists, itâs quite small.