UKH

I'm restarting the previous thread because it got archived while the argument was still raging.

To kick off I want to be clear that this is not about vax vs no vax it is just about the relative number of side effects between the various vaccines.  

Nobody is saying all the yellow card reports are actual vaccine side effects.  Many will be coincidental.  But as I keep saying if you want to believe that Pfizer and AZ have roughly similar levels of side effects despite there being far more reports for AZ than Pfizer then you also have to come up with a theory as to why there are more 'false' reports for AZ than Pfizer.

The first attempt in the previous thread was 'AZ was used on old people.'  Which wasn't true - Pfizer came out first and most of the really old and sick got Pfizer in Jan and Feb.

Then it was AZ wasn't used on any young people, the implication being that young people are healthy and so don't file nearly as many yellow card reports.   That argument doesn't work either because we have data for Moderna and Moderna was *only* used on young people.   The reporting ratio for Moderna is not that different from AZ and *way* lower than Pfizer.    You can't explain Pfizer being only 1 in 215 when AZ is 1/111 as being simply due to Pfizer being used on young people when young people are filing at 1/129 when they get Moderna.

* Pfizer - 20million people - 32.1m doses - Yellow Card reporting rate - 1-in-215 people impacted
* Astrazeneca - 24.7m people - 47.5m doses - Yellow Card reporting rate - 1-in-111 people impacted
* Moderna - 1.3m people received first dose - Yellow Card reporting rate - 1-in-129 people impacted

Then, when you get into individual symptoms rather than the overall number of reports the ratios vary a lot from symptom to symptom.  Mostly AZ is quite a bit worse, sometimes getting on for 10x worse, but there are a couple where Pfizer is worse.   If the theory is the reports are all coincidences and the dominant factor in the number of reports is different demographics  and their background health issues then why is it varying so much from symptom to symptom.

The obvious simple explanation is that the largest factor is different side effects from different medicines.

 No different from any other drug or vaccine. 

Oh and before I forget. Pfizer only has emergency licence approval with the FDA in the USA, not full approval. 
 

Fascinating subject. 

It really wasn't long before AZ came on stream. A few weeks. It was not 'most of the really old'. It really wasn't. It was a few of the oldest.

The only young people AZ was given to were i) medical professionals, who know all about yellow card and ii) people in the c.e.v. groups who... wait for it.... have medical problems. [audience gasps]

You need to account for all of the confounding factors. I'll say it again. It doesn't seem to matter how many times we say it but one more won't hurt. You need to account for all of the confounding factors.

It isn't 'worse'. The professional analysis is that there's a certainty of feeling a bit peaky, maybe having a headache, possibly needing someone to say "there there". You can have a miniscule risk of clotting or a very similar miniscule risk of myocarditis. Yes they're different technologies. Yes they have different side effects. No, it's not "worse". And most importantly you can't get to that conclusion by the noddy bullshit maths you keep punting out here, because almost all of the stats you are basing your flawed conclusions on had f-all to do with the vaccines.

To save everyone going over the same argument, for the nth time, here's that thread again...

https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/covid_adverse_affects-737732

You must be new here.

Should I report my forehead contusions on a Yellow Form, do you think...?

No Covid vaccine is fully approved in the US.

Is AZ fully approved in the UK? I don't think it even has emergency use authorization here yet.

Yep. I was amazed when I found out. 

Not sure in U.K.  

I believe there’s an interdependent relationship between the covid state of emergency / laws and the vaccine program

edit and at last a sense making GP on twitter

https://mobile.twitter.com/dr_musgrave

I believe that too as it would be pretty weird if laws did not change by loosening in response to uptake of vaccines reducing deaths and serious illness despite large numbers of cases.

sigh, I believe if the vaccine is on emergency authorisation the emergency laws need to remain in place to authorise its use, this may not be true as I haven’t been to politifact to check if it’s wrongthink 

They are going for full authorization shortly (days to weeks). It's quite right they don't rush authorization through so what they did was quite typical and in line with the procedures used for other disease outbreaks.

I tried logic and science and stuff, as did many other posters.

I am reduced to memes.

There is a simple theory on the table which explains the data i.e. there are different numbers of reports because the different vaccines have different levels of side effects.  There's no reason to believe that radically different technologies should have the same side effects.

Instead of testing that theory and trying to disprove it, you and your little gang are coming up with more complex and less testable theories.   When data is presented which clashes with those theories you resort to memes, ganging up and piss taking.

You haven't come up with any credible reason to believe that very large variances in reports between vaccines 2x to about 9x depending on the symptom can be explained by different demographics being given each vaccine.   The first version of the theory, that it is because the old people got AZ is blown to shreds by the fact that the oldest actually got mostly Pfizer and the second variation of the theory that Pfizer was used on young people and young people don't file reports is blown to shreds by the fact that young people filed quite a lot of reports when they were given Moderna.

Let's see where this is in a month or so.    The initial reports of a blood clot problem with AZ were also rubbished and mocked in the UK. 

I'd suggest it is quite possible that once people believe rightly or wrongly, that one medicine or vaccine has more side effects than the other then  then people will simply blame that particular  item with any malady, sickness, symptom or sign they get whilst taking it, then humans being humans and social media being social media, everyone else will also start believing that a particular vaccine or medicine has side effects and start to blame that medicine or vaccine for everything.that ever happens to them.

I could see that is possible, but if that was what was happening and it was just a mass psychosomatic reaction to blame AZ then AZ would be worse on every symptom and all the symptoms would scale in pretty much the same way.  Also if people have a problem with AZ because of the publicity about clots and are over-reporting on AZ it doesn't explain why the reports for Moderna are also pretty high relative to Pfizer. 

The numbers are all over the place from symptom to symptom.  AZ is usually worse than Pfizer but the ratios from symptom to symptom are completely different.  Sometimes 2x worse, sometimes 9x worse and in a small number of cases pretty much the same or slightly better.

It's easy to understand different ratios of reports between vaccines for different symptoms if the underlying cause is side effects from different medicines, less so if it is underlying illness and coincidence the symptoms emerge after vaccination.

You need another hobby.

At least your anti English ranting was harmless, all this side effect $hit is potentially putting off a vaccine hesitant person from being jabbed, it's dangerous. You're not much better than the very dubious trolls who appear daily with 10 year old previously inactive accounts.

No one at any point has suggested that they would have the same side effects. No one doubts that one will have fewer side effects than the other. No one doubts that one will have fewer serious side effects. So please stop saying this.

Ok let's test the theory...please tell me which of the reports are due to the vaccine and which are co-incident. Even an estimate would do.

Please give detailed demographics data

Please tell me any other biases which might affect reporting

Oh, you can't. That means we can't test the theory. This is the point made over and over and over. 

You are prepared to accept a very low bar for evidence. This is a different bar to what we are suggesting, and funnily enough also a different bar to what the entire world uses when assessing a vaccine or drug harm. They first try to statistically strip out the non-vacvine related illness before making an assessment. This gang you refer to are simply advocating we do that.

Sure we can have a guess in advance, using shit data, but what's the point?

edit: you seem to think we are 'defending' a vaccine. We are not. We are defending a process.

edit 2: Dr Wakefield took your view and worked out that kids started getting autism after having MMR jab, and decided there was a causal link, rather than going to the effort to work out that diagnosis of autism often happens around the same age as MMR jabs. His was a simple theory too

Incorrect. No one's saying it's 'pychosomatic' except you. There could be differential reporting caused by exposure to different levels/rates/spin-on media stories . This is not 'pychosomatic' it's a well known effect that you keep on ignoring.

As it's a reporting effect,it is also easy to see that it will have a different impact for different symptoms. The chance of reporting would be a complex interaction between rates of worry about the symptoms, likelihood of thinking/noting these might be due to the vaccine (directly affected by different media stories for example) and then rate of caring enough to get onto or access to, the yellow card system.

As a clear example - the literature for AZ contains some specific symptoms to look out for (related to potential rare clotting events, so not in other vaccines literature)and if observered to report to a GP. This will obviously mean that for a whole tranch of symptoms there is a much higher rate of reporting side effects than for other vaccines.

Note - this is one example of the sort of processes which will mean significantly different rates reports of possible side effects are to be expected, between different vaccines and having different ratios between different vaccines.

This is absolute, tasteless bullshit nonsense Tom.

You’re saying things like “credible” and “torn to shreds” but all you’re using is words.  Words aren’t science Tom.  Words can explain science.

You keep calling to a 10x discrepancy as if that can’t be explained by age.  Do you have any comprehension of the ageing process?  Hint - one is about 1,000 times more likely to die at 80 than at 20.  A thousand times.  Prevalence of all sorts of ailments rises on those kind of scales with age; for many people it’s the ailments that kill them.

You do not have the necessary data to control for the significant confounding factors.

You could try and pull some data together, but you haven’t.  You’re making the exact same broken record nonsense analysis of the raw YCS data and dressing it in words, not science.  If you want people to believe you, you can’t just stick your fingers in your ears and go lalala over confounding factors - and from a scientific perspective the words in your posts are just lalalaing.

What’s the P-number for your hypothesis, Tom?

Just to repeat two key points from your post:

In reply to TradDad:

Getting a free peer review of your methodology is not being “punished”.

I do not know what your issue is as you said yourself you have had AZ .I also guess that your family is vaccinated .

Has it worked?I assume yes  

What is  your real issue other than some anti English/ BJ tripe. 

Thats in a nutshell.

I dont normally mention spelling mistakes but that is one odd misspelling of "agrees with my claims".

Perhaps you might want to consider why you have had such difficulty finding the one who does. Could it be all the others are the ones making sense and the outlier the one who is wrong.

In reply to Prussock:

Oh look another new member anti vaxer

When you say 'another'......

I had my suspicions after the first post, but the second removed any doubt.

We havent had one for, ooohhhh, at least a day I guess it was due.

Is it just me or is there something familiar about that writing style?

No. It is a reasonable interpretation of the available data which is being resisted for social/political reasons.

The whole 'you can't say that because if you say that someone might do something stupid' is not a valid argument when we are trying to have a scientific discussion.  That sort of thinking f*cks up processes and contaminates organisations.   

My view, which I have stated again and again is that both vaccines are massively better than no vaccine but, on the available data it looks to me that Pfizer is significantly safer than AZ.

I am not a scientist, I am an engineer. I make real world decisions when they need to be made and I try and design robust systems in the presence of incomplete data.   The data here is incomplete but there is enough of it for me to change my operating assumptions and make decisions to reduce overall risk i.e. if I have the choice I'll be going for Pfizer.   Actually, this conclusion is irrelevant because the UK government has already decided it won't be AZ for third jabs or jabs for the as-yet-unjagged.   I'm not actually arguing with UK government policy. 

That would be relevant if you had evidence that there was vastly more AZ used in very old people.

The only data anyone has shown about the ratio of jags in old people was the information on vaccine supply in Scotland in Q1 of this year.    It was mostly Pfizer, an initial delivery of 470k followed by several smaller ones.   Scaling by a factor of ten to get UK figures would imply about 5 million Pfizer first doses in Jan/Feb.  The people getting jagged in Jan Feb were the very old and sick.  Then you get the matching second doses 12 weeks later so a total of 10 million Pfizer doses in that demographic. 

According to the EU it had exported 10 million doses of vaccine to the UK by March 9th.  At that time the AZ plants in the EU had production problems and the EU couldn't get the AZ vaccine.  When you Google articles from that time there references to AZ not meeting its promised delivery schedule to the UK and AZ orders from India not arriving.  

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-10/who-s-right-in-the-u-k-a...

According to the figures in the OP there are 32 million Pfizer doses total.   If 10 million doses went in by March/April it was old people getting them and that is 1/3 of the Pfizer number.  There was a ton of AZ getting used in April/May/June but by then they were doing people in their 50s and 60s.  The 80 year olds were more likely to get Pfizer.

The idea that young people are healthy and Pfizer gets a lower number than AZ because in the last few months it was used for young people and young people don't make reports is also nonsense because young people make a lot of reports about Moderna.   

Maybe Pfizer is just better. 

I don't have enough data to do the level of analysis necessary for a scientific publication.  But I have enough data to make pragmatic decisions and form a working assumption.   If the data improves I can change my opinion.

A lot bigger than the P number for the 'it is all demographic factors' hypothesis.  Or the 'we can't possibly know so lets just assume there's no difference between them' hypothesis.

I'm not trying to get published in the BMJ, I am trying to form a reasonable working hypothesis based on the information available to me now.

I'll definitely be flagging up my acute brickwall syndrome.

jk

None of the theories are testable by us, the data in the public domain are (is?) too incomplete. That's is all you're being told. Over and over and over and over again.

The little ribbing you have received is richly deserved at this point, it comes after dozens of patient explanations as to why your method is utterly useless.

Note I don't say your conclusions are wrong, they may or may not be, just that you've spectacularly failed to prove your case by failing to consider and address the confounding factors.

That doesn't seem at all unlikely to me given the radically different cohorts but without more complete data it cannot be controlled for so the signal cannot be extracted from the noise.

This isn't 'initial reports', it's several months worth of messy, incomplete raw data dressed up by antivax cranks as proof of something it isn't. Part of that something, relying on all the same misconceptions, you've latched onto presumably because of your strongly held views regarding UK government corruption. You're in the rabbit hole, you really need to look for a way out before you get lost.

jk

Sorry tom - I don't get it. You know the roll out of the vaccines has been highly non-random with respect to age. You know that reactions, both true and spurious, will be highly non-random with respect to age. Reportage will also be non-random with respect to age, nor need that relationship be linear. You also know that there are a whole host of other factors that might confound your simplistic interpretation of the raw data. Some confounding factors are really, really easy to control for (age is one) and this analysis is no doubt currently underway. Why would you rashly and persistently jump the gun on this analysis? Don't engineers understand anything about statistical analysis?

In the three-horse race to be "the worse vaccine" between AZ, Pfizer and Moderna there will undoubtedly be a winner. The margin by which they win is a non-trivial consideration in the planning of future vaccination strategies. Important stuff, on which lives will depend.  You might be backing the right horse, or you might not, but until you are prepared to examine evidence carefully - especially when the simplistic interpretation happens to suit your prejudices - you will always, in the long run, be the bookies' darling. 

And in the process here you are, proclaiming a massive victory already, spreading a bit of misinformation, sowing a bit of doubt, and inadvertently providing a perfect stage for look-at-me-charlatans like "Prussock" to perform their grim jigs.

That's right, and there are potentially significant features of the way they work that might influence future policy.  There are also likely to be straightforward improvements that could easily change the calculus completely (for example, I suspect the new AZ constructs targeted at more recent variants will also have addressed the cryptic splice site issue).

The fact remains that for anyone over the age of about 30 any of these vaccines is vastly safer than risking getting your immunity by infection.  For younger people it's still safer, though not by such a margin, but then there's the broader consideration of reducing infection rates, especially by asymptomatic carriers.  

Considering AZ has been considered too risky for under-40s for several months now and the government has said it will not be used for booster jabs because of its ineffectiveness against Delta, I'd say Tom has pretty good grounds for not backing that particular horse already.

That said, Israel backed Pfizer and has had one of the most effective vaccination programs in the world, but they have still just been placed on the US's highest Covid risk level. As of tomorrow, all Israelis entering the USA will have to quarantine regardless of vaccination status.

Yup. Normally his bigotry is more amusing than anything but currently he is helping fuel the "Just happened to sign up today" crowd.

Speaking of high quality research. I think the anti vaccine/lockdown/something mob yesterday need special mention.  Their valiant protest about BBC news being biased wasnt at all undermined at the fact they were protesting outside a building the BBC had mostly moved out of and even the bits it had retained were mostly rented out to ITV.

Do you have a source to back this statement up?

As far as I can tell, we're waiting for JCVI to give guidance.

I would note that the effectiveness against hospitalisation and severe illness against Delta is both very high and similar for AZ and Pfizer.

I would also note that there is evidence emerging that using a different vaccine for the booster (regardless of the first vaccine) is beneficial.  With the current AZ vaccine being not recommended for the young people who received Pfizer first time around and evidence for multi-vaccine effects, this limits what could be offered as a booster to exclude AZ despite its high efficacy in protecting individual health.

Don't let me stop you anticipating the reasoning for a JCVI decision that hasn't happened yet though.

You don't know that because you haven't even attempted to determine the size of the effects.

I've never seen such a clear and consistent set of replies from so many posters - and I know enough about the professional backgrounds of some of them to know that they're commenting with professional experience that translates directly to what they're saying here.

I was going to comment some more, but I am reduced to memes.  Anything I say would just be a less elegant re-hashing of posts from jkarran and Wicamoi.

Vaccines don't stop you catching it. Israeli death rate from covid is still low. The vaccine is saving their lives.

For any vaccine to work the disease has to enter your body, covid, small pox, chicken pox.... your enhance immune response to a vaccinated illness can't respond until the disease is in you. What differs is the speed with which it's destroyed, symptoms you feel and harm it does to you. This is the stage heavily vaccinated populations are at, high case rates, low deaths among the vaccinated, regardless of vaccine type.  

One side effect I still have is serious pain in my arm. This was from my first jab which was back in May. It’s as though I have long term muscle damage from the injection 

Yes, since that paper came out I've not seen any mention of this, but it seems clear that AZ could rapidly integrate the findings in to their new constructs.

Something I keep meaning to ask you (and kathrynrc if they're reading)

Do you think the difference in number of splice sites between AZ and Janssen constructs was a result of something Janssen knew, or just coincidental?  The notable difference put me in mind of some of the discussions around shared practice around safety (or not) between competitors and the Apollo 1 fire.

More horses coming along.  

Valneva is particularly interesting, being inactivated whole virus it contains many viral proteins, not just the spike.  It's also been shown to induce broad T-cell responses against multiple different viral proteins.  I find that very interesting.

A Phase 3 trial is in progress to look at using Valneva as a "booster" shot.

Big manufacturing plant under construction in the UK (Scotland as it happens).

The data I've seen supports this argument too.

So why do people stoke such division between the vaccinated and unvaccinated on here? The unvaccinated are regularly accused of being immoral, selfish and a danger to society but actually most grannies are more likely to catch Covid off their double-jabbed children than, for example, an unvaccinated till worker. Good news is that double-jabbed grannies are well protected against serious illness or death.

Some people need to chill the f#ck out a bit!

Officially yes, but the jabs have already been bought!

I think you missed my point.

Also, 400 million doses were ordered by February - we've constantly ordered far more than we are ever going to use, so I don't think I'd equate placing orders to planning to use them.

Sorry, no idea, and I haven’t looked at the Janssen sequence.  The only reason I was aware of the AZ issue so quickly was a chance conversation with a climbing friend who’s a splicing expert.

An unvaccinated till worker is also more likely to transmit the disease to somebody including their granny than the double-jabbed.

Because we’re facing more restrictions because selfish shits won’t get vaccinated. In the US you can see the difference vaccinating 75% of the population and only vaccinating 50%. TX is now asking for extra help. They should only provide relief if there is a mask mandate and a change in the vaccinations policy.

How about because if you end up in hospital its not good either for you, your family or the NHS or other patients in the backlog.Its not good for the economy and its not good for your future tax bills.

So yes its being selfish.Especially when its so low cost to sort out.Its hardly a £100,000 a year drug bill for say a cancer treatment.

Whereas I had exactly the opposite experience!  I had a long term problem with a muscle tear and scarring in my deltoid, very close the the injection site.  My arm was pretty sore for about four days after my first shot, but since then I've had no problem with the old injury at all! 

because unless you have a medical reason you should be vaccinated, there's no excuse.

Because they are.

True, but if all are vaccinated, they will be ill for less time, and less likely to go to hospital. Win win. 

We're gearing up for the booster dose with absolutely no idea which vaccine we will be using. 

As someone who had my second dose in March I'm pretty keen to get the booster. Simply don't care which one of the Pfizer/AZ/Moderna vaccines I get.

Stay well everyone.

M

Of course any side effects of the vaccine have to be considered against the possibility of side effects from a 'mild covid infection your immune system fights off'
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/aug/10/what-is-happening-to-me-tee...

I totally agree, I don't care either. And we all should remember that AZ is considerably cheaper for the government to buy.

That's the thing most stats only consider dead or alive, but many folk live with covid body damage that could effect them forever. 

Here we go again! A better way of guaranteeing against transmission is to have been tested negative within  the previous 72-hour period. So people who haven't been tested recently must also be 'selfish shits', right? Or does UKC double-think find a way around this inconvenience?

Testing costs money and is far more expensive both in respect of time and money.

Its not a zero sum game you know.

Slight diversion here, sorry about that.

A question for the immune system experts.

If you've got antibodies (either from catching Covid or from vaccination), and you come into contact with Covid, but you fight it off effectively enough so that you would test negative (as well as being asymptomatic), then does that rejuvenate your antibodies in the same way that a booster shot would?

:

Its not better though. There is a significant false negative rate for lateral flow tests and, unless you plan on everybody testing every couple of days for ever, it isn't a long term solution.

On the other hand, if most people get vaccinated, aside from protecting themselves, since vaccination dramatically reduces onwards transmission rates, the disease will fizzle out. Just like multiple other diseases have where we've had an effective vaccination and high uptake.

You can’t test every day. Get vaccinated or face increasing social exclusion. It’s coming like it or not. This has all been through the courts before, we can and should mandate vaccines.

Registered 3rd July 2021 - are you yet another FAKE ?

Lad I'm working with today, his wife has been to hospital with a blood clot on her lung. That was the 2nd moderna jab. No issues with 1st jab.

She home now but lots of tests and injections to remove clot. 

It's another Romcarnation.

The data will clearly show without a shadow of a doubt that the Valneva vaccine doesn't have any side-effects and can cure the common cold and being struck by lightning. Don't even need to wait until the reports are in. It's obvious from the data, which is obvious.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZT! Bullshit alarm.
Not sure how many more times we can tell you, this is what we're all taking issue with. Your interpretation of the data is absolutely not reasonable.

Can't be hard to make some kind of verification process, new user can't post for 1month, start thread until being active for 3 months. Inactive for 12mths and account is frozen, until you contact admins. We know Rom had/has what 11 or 12 account, likely more.

The data does not clash.  Your analysis admits no conclusion.  It’s the analysis people clearly have a problem with.

Well, you’re not listening to a single word anyone else says.  I don’t see much point in repeating myself or what others are saying here.

I have not communicated by any back channel with anyone over this, and I doubt other posters have either.  That so many people draw similar criticisms over your analysis can also be explained by their being a giant gaping hole in your analysis, rather than “ganging up.”

I am curious as to why you reject the patiently explained comments from so many different people who are all in genuine, spontaneous agreement?

I think you have received a remarkably thoughtful set of responses from many people that show the level of time people have for you, but I think you are fast eroding that respect.

3 different attributes now remind me of banned poster Big Bruva.  They will perhaps disclaim this and claim it’s proof of me being wrong again.  Or was that Rom again?

To be fair to oureed, as I said before, Rom would often take to playing the fool.

ZOE as well as other survey indeed confirms higher reported occurrences of moderate after-effects with AZ.

According to ZOE:

"Around one in three people (34%) who received one dose of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine experienced at least one systemic effect, compared with roughly one in eight getting the Pfizer jab"

Yougov :

"The results show that people who received the AstraZeneca vaccine are more likely to report experiencing side effects than those who received the Pfizer vaccine. Across all doses, 36% of those who had at least one AZ jab reported never having a side effect, compared to 46% of Pfizer recipients."

https://yougov.co.uk/topics/health/articles-reports/2021/06/24/what-side-ef...

It's not the end of the world.

In itself it doesn't make AZ a "bad" or "worse" vaccine.
It would be in fact, quite the coincidence if two vaccines that are quite different had exactly the same frequency of reported moderate side effects.

But for some reason if you say anything that *could* be interpreted as negative about the AZ vaccine, no matter how trivial, or how plausible the hypothesis is, you can be sure to hurt the very fragile national pride of some, so don't expect rational answers.

But I suspect this was your intent, and you clearly have succeeded.

I prefer Germanys proposed method of dealing with what you suggest.You have to pay for the tests. That would soon change your attitude...no " free lunches" so to speak.

My god, who foots your VPN bill?  I feel this is an important question.

You seem to have missed the point of almost all the other contributors to this thread, which is not a discussion of side-effects between vaccines, but a serious critique of the method Tom is presenting for his analysis.  As well as being utterly flawed, at its core this method legitimises taking raw YCS data as indicative of actual side effects, which is exactly what the anti-vax brigade are doing, and which is utter garbage.

Still, I think quite a few of us suspect you are also the overt anti-vax poster who was here a few hours ago.  

In reply to thread:

Purported screenshot of Rom's computer when they start composing a message to UKC these days...

Sigh and now we have someone else doubling down with claims based on incomplete information.

How have you removed age/health as contributing factors to side effects?

Have all the people recieved the same number of jabs. The reference to "at least one" doesnt support this which could potentially skew results.

Given the noise being made about AZ how has that been accounted for?

I am also confused about your reference to  "very fragile national pride". To be honest I am not sure exactly why I should be getting excited over a vaccine which happened to be developed in a particular country or not?  I think you are mistaking most of us for extreme nationalists who would feel the need to claim the credit or blame something just based on its origin.

I am opposed to his claims because its pretty much the same position as being held by the antivax lunatics who are misreading the data on ideological grounds hence why they are supporting him. Its a bit more targeted but ultimately the same thing. He is making claims about data that isnt really usable by anyone but professionals with access to lots of accompanying data.

Well, I can think of one extreme nationalist on this thread...

There's a bunch of Roms, too.

I see there was a flurry of new accounts on 1st August. By weird coincidence, a 'MikeDubby' registered just before 'MikeBuddy'. What are the chances, eh...?

You're getting pretty paranoid in your old age.  Everyone who disagrees with you is getting treated like they were an idiot or a sock puppet.   You're a pretty smart guy, but you aren't *that* smart.

Tom's analysis is very much back of the envelope but we are looking at really large effects.  Some of these symptom reports are 9x worse for AZ than Pfizer.   

The UK governments 'the vaccine' communication strategy which they seem to have forced on the BBC and the press is not helpful.  There's no such thing as 'the vaccine' there are multiple vaccines based on multiple different technologies.  'The vaccine' is an intentional over-simplification and distortion  designed to nudge people into behaving in a way which suits the government.

I don't know what the exact breakdown of vaccine use across age groups is because the UK government is keeping it secret.  But everyone who live through the last 8 months and read the press has a reasonable idea of what happened.  This is what I think:

a. First three months Jan/Feb/March there was a lot more Pfizer because the UK got in with a big order before other countries approved it.   The leaked data from Scottish Government suggests about 5 million doses of Pfizer in Jan.  The statement from the EU that the UK had received 10 million jags from them by March 9th is consistent with those 5 million doses plus the matching second doses.

b. AZ eventually got their act together and became the main source of vaccine, at the same time Pfizer supply was constrained because the Tories had p*ssed off the EU by refusing to let AZ supply them.   So April/May/June probably most people were getting AZ although there was still some Pfizer.  By April/May/June we were past the oldest and sickest and into the 60s and 50s.

c. After the blood clot issue with AZ was acknowledged it became policy that young people would get Pfizer or Moderna.   But that group isn't finished yet a lot are waiting on their second dose.

Nobody has come up with a convincing reason why background health issues should show up far more in reports about AZ than reports about Pfizer.  Or why young people would be filing 2x as many reports about Moderna than Pfizer.  The 'its all background health effects and age related' argument is pretty weak because we did the sickest and oldest first and we used a ton of Pfizer in Jan/Feb.

I have not been treating you like an idiot.  I have gone out of my way to be clear.  I'm kind of running out of steam though.  I've also run out of Facepalm memes.  Dammnit.

I'm smart enough to spot that your argument has been disagreed with strongly by something like a dozen posters, at least one with a directly relevant professional backgrounds in controlling surveys of population level statistics.

As for labelling "MikeBuddy" as a sock puppet, I am smart enough to check if they're registered for two accounts simultaneously.

• MikeDuddy - https://www.ukclimbing.com/user/profile.php?id=319629
• MikeBuddy - https://www.ukclimbing.com/user/profile.php?id=319630

 > Tom's analysis is very much back of the envelope but we are looking at really large effects.  Some of these symptom reports are 9x worse for AZ than Pfizer.   

Oh. My. God.

Tom's Analysis?

Did you forget to change accounts before posting Rom?

How.  Incredibly.  Embarrassing.

Why are you replying to Wintertree and referring to your own name in the thread content as if you were someone else?
Forgotten who you are signed in as?

About the same chance as someone else suddenly undergoing a personality change and talking about themselves in the third person?

I think Tom may have been talking about himself in the third person. I don't think t_i_e is another Rombot.

But, bloody hell, having just sampled through the last ten days' new profiles, most of them look like bots...

No, but conversely it's plausible that Rom could be any pre-existing site user who fancied a bit of a carry on and got more than a bit carried away.  

I suppose someone could suddenly and uncharacteristically start talking about themselves in the third person, it's not beyond the possible.  And it's not like they have many views in common.

Although the comments to me on paranoia and treating obvious sock puppets as sock puppets are not very characteristic for tom_in_edinburgh..  I'm struggling for the pronouns to use when ascribing characteristics to persona as opposed to people here.  It's all gone a bit Philip K Dick.  

If Tom really is trying to paint me as paranoid for calling out the abso-bloody-loutly obvious sock puppet with two accounts, well that's their loss.

name_name_YY?  Bizarre isn't it.  I'm awaiting for a flood of 200+ dislikes on my next Covid plotting thread.  Possible someone is tickling the signup process for some obscure reason and never verifying any accounts?  

Edit: Now I think about it, one purpose for the last few weeks' of odd signups would be to salt any automatic attempts to spot malicious multi-account signups as the pop-up poster or posters have been using.  The apparent auto-ban on "Rom" like accounts (or someone in UKC staring at a live feed of signups with a bottomless coffee mug?) had been getting very effective at jumping on these, perhaps this is the other side's escalation of tactics?

Which is why the UK government announced buying an additional 60 million doses of Pfizer to use for the boosters.

https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1116

Meanwhile they announce donating 9 million doses of AZ to developing countries.

https://www.pulsetoday.co.uk/news/coronavirus/uk-to-begin-to-donate-million...

So UK Government have at least 9 million doses of AZ on the shelf but they are actually going to buy Pfizer and use that in the UK instead.

Ooft. I think that might be an Extinction Level Event to any credibility remaining in the account! 

Look out for Madge in Morningside account coming your way later this week.

Possibly it will turn out that the combination of AZ and Pfizer is actually pretty good, possibly Valneva will be better than either of them.  Maybe Valneva will have even worse side effects since it is a full Covid virus.  Maybe mixing AZ and Pfizer will have worse side effects.  There's no data on any of this.

However, there is data on side effect reports of AZ, Pfizer and Moderna based on millions of jags for Moderna and tens of millions of jags for Pfizer and AZ and for some symptoms there are really large differences in the ratio of jags to reports.   

Guillian Barre Syndrome - 44 (Pfizer) + 358 (AZ) + 2 (Moderna) + 5 (Unknown) = 409

Tremor - 1101 (Pfizer) + 9549 (AZ) + 95 (Moderna) + 36 (Unknown) = 10,781

Deep Vein Thrombosis - 187 (Pfizer) + 1071 (AZ) + 7 (Moderna) + 8 (Unknown) = 1273

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/...
and
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/...
are the latest reports I can find, and, you know what, AZ has caused a lot more congenital disorders than Pfizer. And it can time travel further too - AZ was causing problems back in 1921 but Pfizer only started giving people problems in 1968.

Read the bit RIGHT AT THE TOP that says "The relative number and nature of reports should therefore not be used to compare the safety of the different vaccines. ". Then read it again. And again. To save us all f**king typing it so many goddamn times.

There's masses of signups every day. This was a red herring back in the Alyson30 days. One of the mods kindly jumped in to point out they get tons of signups by bots and most don't pass the email verification step, but the username stays. So just incrementing the query string doesn't tell you much.
Dubby/Buddy though.....?

Oh, undoubtedly, most signups will be bots. Some recent signups have some profile stuff added, so I'm assuming they're genuine. Some are already blocked.

But the MikeDubby/MikeBuddy is a truly egregious example of a sockpuppet creation, which has obviously passed email verification. It does make you wonder how many of the other adjacent profiles are from the same source, though.

This was announced ages ago. They'll be arriving any day now. They'll be second doses for 20-somethings and firsts and seconds for teenagers. We've known about those for months.

How many have you filled in? 1000? 10000?

So I'm not clear, can I just add up the total number of reports and whichever has the most is the worst?

Turns out yeah, apparently. None of us thought so at first but now we know we were wrong to involve logic and reason.

Yes, so long as it’s Astra Xenophobia. 

Yet another fake what?

You are correct, which is why many governments are pushing for vaccination over testing but money is not the only factor to consider. To my knowledge swab testing has neglible, if any, side effects. So as well as being more effective (if done regularly) it's also safer. How much is that worth in £s?

Also, be aware that although the UK has been a good example of how to organise vaccination, it is a terrible example for testing. Since the start of the pandemic I've visited 9 countries and 4 continents and the UK has easily the most expensive and cumbersome testing system I've come across. It can be done much, much better!

You have no idea what my financial situation is! Some people would be much happier paying £1000/year in testing than have a piece of genetically-modified chimpanzee virus injected into their bodies. 

Yougov's survey is demographically re-weighted.

You can always slice and dice into the data.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/laninf/article/PIIS1473-3099(21)00224-3/...

I am not sure why either. But it does seems to rub some people the wrong way if you say anything potentially negative, no matter how mild, innocuous, or trivially obvious, about the Great British Vaccine.

We've seen that with the whole blood-clot story as well.
Ultimately, it's not helpful and ends up playing in the hands of anti-vax.

Well the jury's still out on that. Do you know of any long-term successful vaccines for other Coronaviruses?

As for "dramatically reduces onwards transmission rates" it seems that Pfizer reduces Delta transmission by 64% (Israeli study) or 79% (Public Health Scotland). AZ reduces it by only 60% (PHS).

Aggressive coronaviruses tend to fizzle out over time regardless, much like aggressive influenza viruses.

Out of curiosity, where between 60% and 64% have you set your threshold for “dramatically”? 

Their effects might "fizzle out" because the most susceptible die, and because everyone else ends up with some reasonably persistent immunity, and because the viruses then circulate at a level with highly moderated consequences updating immunity as they go.

The last year has made it obvious to all but a fool that without vaccination, we were a long long way from such a point, perhaps half a million deaths away in the UK and 4x the disruption suffered to date.

The jury is still out on a lot of things, but that doesn't preclude taking the obvious and highly evidenced actions available to us now that improve our situation now so that we can live to fight the long term battles.  It seems clear to me that vaccines have a pivotal role in that.

So - taking a leaf from the Boris Johnson playbook, if you make a huge faux-pas, just try and ignore it and carry on as if nothing happened. The public are idiots and will get distracted.

I wonder how many accounts chatting to each other as this thread continues are actually TiE fighters?

It's Nathan's description, not mine. I'm just giving him the latest stats.

Your comment read like you thought 60% wasn't 'dramatically'. So rather than side stepping the question, perhaps you could answer it so we could be clear what you meant

Bury it in the noise, a rather common technique around here these days.

I have increasingly been wondering - it's a real shame when an endless barrage of dishonest and deceitful posting behaviour leaves others questioning the identity of all and sundry, really undermines the value of this place.

To keep up with the SciFi references, it's starting to feel like the bridge of Spaceball 1 around here.

Great English Vaccine. You can't even get the name right

Bastard English Vaccine, I think. Or, at a pinch, Bastard Westminster Vaccine...

Species-hopping bat virus is okay, though...?

Johnson's Jab Juice.

Just use the force, you can usually get a feeling to them.

If you want to fret, Google marburg virus just breaking out in West Africa. Only 88% fatality rate! 

Johnson's Jag Juice, surely...

Oh shit. I think the right approach is obviously to let it rip, and attain herd immunity. Or we could delay doing anything for a few weeks to hit the optimum point in the wave </sarcasm>

I do hope they don't follow our covid pandemic response.

Do you know of any other widely circulating Coronaviruses where we have had such effective vaccines?

I'm not clear whether those figures are for both parties being vaccinated or just the infected person. Either way, >=60% reduction in onwards transmission seems dramatic to me. Given that most of the infections at the moment are apparently amongst the unvaccinated, you'd expect it to push the R-rate in the UK well below its current level of around 1.

Of course we could just let all the unvaccinated and those whose immune system hasn't generated a very strong response get sick and then count on the natural immunity of the survivors to do that but, to me, that seems likely to be slower and costlier (in every way) strategy.

We'll be getting immunity by hook or by crook.

It's starting to look like you've got one to many instances of the letters 'i' and 'n' in your post there.

This thread is starting to look like an orchestrated disgrace.

Type it as many times as you like.  I am not arguing that every report is an actual side effect.   But nobody has shown a good reason why AZ vaccine should have many times more reports which are not related to side effects than Pfizer.  This generic disclaimer does not address that at all.

The UK government doesn't want people drawing their own conclusions from the numbers.  It has a point about not all reports being actual side effects.   I am far less convinced that it has a point when it says you shouldn't compare relative numbers of reports.  The UK government has a dog in this race, it does not want AZ looking bad compared to Pfizer. 

Miss Jean Brodie...?

What the article I linked says, presumably taken from the DHSC announcement is:

"The UK will roll out a covid-19 booster vaccine at the beginning of autumn in order to protect the most vulnerable ahead of winter, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has announced.

As part of this, the government’s vaccines taskforce has secured an additional 60m doses of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine, which will be used alongside the other vaccines already purchased."

I haven't filled in any.  I had two doses of AZ and no side affects at all.  Not even mild ones.

In fact I didn't even know that the yellow card system was an open web site until a day or so ago when I got involved with this debate.   I imagine very few people know about the reporting system until they have symptoms bad enough to talk with a GP.

However, unlike the people ganging up on me, when I see side effect reports are far more frequent for one vaccine than the other I am going to go with the obvious and simplest explanation until proven different.

It's for the people with the more complex theories about it all being down to demographic factors to come up with some numbers.   I am quite happy to change my view if I am shown some evidence for another explanation.

As a rhetorical device in response to someone else saying 'Tom's analysis' I started my response the same way.

I only have one account on UKC and it is far more likely to go to zero accounts than two or more.

Its not the UK government but the MHRA. If it helps you can look at how they challenged the government on the grounds they didnt agree lateral flow tests were effective in schools. to reassure yourself they are not government stoogies.

That the yellow card system isnt directly useful to nonexperts has been inbuilt into it for years. You only need to look at why it was decided it was needed to realise that. However since you admit you had never heard of it until recently explains why you are confused. It doesnt explain though why you double down on your error.

If you are claiming they are under the government control you really need to provide some evidence beyond your normal anti English bigotry. Look at those who are flocking to your defence and perhaps think that saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a crap one.

So TiE is running the endless string of sock puppets, I genuinely didn't see that twist coming.

If it's not a job someone has serious issues.

Jk

When someone refers to 'themselves' in the third person, we could go with the obvious explanation...

Of course, yes.  That explains it.

You were calling me paranoid for referring to the *brand new account* that immediately follows an almost identically named *brand new account* and jumps right in with the familiar tone...  Right after another *brand new account* came along to spew some - now deleted - anti-vax nonsense in the same tone.

Yet you're crying "gang up" when a dozen people independently point out the flaws in your analysis.  None of us were discussing the endpoint of your analysis or anyone else's but how f***ing stupid your analysis is, to the point it goes directly against the riders attached to the data you use.  You've continually tried to misrepresent these criticisms as being about the endpoint not the analysis.

This kind of immediate fallback to outrage combined with throwing mud at other posters in the hope it sticks is exactly the MO of the "Rom" pop-up poster - one who you happen to defend.

Rhetorical my arse.

I was wondering if I was being meta-trolled after I posted this comment elsewhere an hour before that fateful post: "Is that you, Rom?  Remember not to get your two accounts in a muddle if you decide to start posting." [1]

Bet they wish they're read it and could have used that instead of "rhetorical" as a basis to explain this all away...

If we look at what the account tom_in_edinburgh posted:

You're getting pretty paranoid in your old age.  Everyone who disagrees with you is getting treated like they were an idiot or a sock puppet.   You're a pretty smart guy, but you aren't *that* smart.

This is very out of kilter with their persona; they never attack individuals, they've never acknowledged or mentioned my penchant for calling out the obvious sock puppets and so on.   They've never mentioned my intelligence. However all sorts of pop-up posters have insinuated things about me not being as smart as I think, about me being paranoid and so on. It's a most out-of-character post for Tom.

[1] https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_38-...

They're already doing 3rd jabs in Israel - Pfizer, but then I think pretty much all of their jabbing has been Pfizer.

I think tom might be new to the game of multiple user names (MikeBuddy/MikeDuddy?) and has made the rookie mistake of not logging out before re-posting.
Unlike ROM who is a hardened gangbanger and would never make such a mistake...
 

If by "never" you mean "only occasionally" I'm right there with you.

https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/friday_night_covid_plotting_31-...

That was just a ruse to hide other more nefarious activities that were being carried out... 

 

I see what you mean. I always thought tom-in-edinburgh was just a bit eccentric and obviously somewhat unhinged on the subject of Scottish nationalism. He's not alone there of course. I had thought he was honest though. How very disappointing.

Of course they are under UK government control.  They are an agency of the UK government under the Department of Health and Social Care.  If the Tories want to cut their budget or 'reorganise' them they can do it, if the Tories want to change the boss they can change the boss.   

Yes, it does.  Do you actually think I have two UKC accounts?  I couldn't be arsed.  I used to have fun here but now I'm seriously thinking of leaving the site altogether.

Not a dozen, three or four, and yes, it was a gang up.  None of them are addressing the fundamental point i.e. why would the number of 'false' reports be significantly higher for AZ than Pfizer.

Yes, a lot of people said my analysis was f*cking stupid.  It doesn't impress me.  If they had an argument they'd be stating it, not name calling.

The 'rider' is boilerplate.  If they want to say 'don't do differential analysis' and they want me to pay attention they need to say why it is not appropriate for the specific data set.  Even better they could give the actual numbers for each vaccine in each age range.  

You guys have given up trying to show the demographic of people vaccinated with AZ is older or sicker than the demographic vaccinated with Pfizer.  Now it is just memes, name calling and bullsh*t.    If I want to get in a meme war I can do that on Twitter.

Why the f*ck do they collect it if it isn't indicative of actual side effects?

If Burger King had 5x as many reports per customer complaining that they had caught the shits as McDonalds would that be indicative that Burger King had poorer food hygiene than McDonalds?   Of course it would.   It would not prove it for sure but it would certainly 'indicate' it.   At that point the burden of proof would shift: it would be up to Burger King to find some confounding factor - maybe they just ran a massive ad campaign in 'Irritable Bowel Today' magazine and the demographics of their customers were different.

If you were a burger consumer, in the absence of another explanation, that customer feedback data would be more than enough reason to decide you were going to avoid Burger King for a while.  It would be silly to just say 'well there could be another explanation so I'm going to pretend I've not seen this data and just keep eating Burger King until a health department official explains the numbers to me'.  On the other hand if, at some later date, an explanation was forthcoming then there's no reason not to go back to Burger King.

If we culled 88% of the global population it would solve the climate and housing problem. Every cloud has a silver lining. 

Your analogy seems to be missing the bit where not eating burgers still gives one in ten people the shits, but for like 9 months solid, and kills 1/100 people. That feels like it  would also be relevant to consumer behaviour. 

The issue is that people aren’t agreeing with you that your “fundamental point” is indeed fundamental. The level of confidence you are putting in unreliable and incomplete data is unjustified; that’s the “fundamental point” as others see it. There was probably some interesting discussion to be had if you’d been willing to acknowledge the limitations of the data rather than wilfully brushing them under the carpet and moaning about “the English” being mean to you. 

You too are under government control, being subject to their laws. They can cut your budget should they wish to do so. That doesn't seem to make one jot of difference to you. Maybe they are all English and therefore don't have the same powers of resistance that you do. Or maybe you are talking complete and utter shite.

No, two seems very unlikely.  It's almost the most unlikely possibility.  It's either 1 or many.

Perhaps it's just a whole bunch of coincidences that this thread has been the jumping off point for the usual range of new sign up sock puppet and anti-vax accounts (some posts removed), and that they're the only posters supporting your position(*), and that you called me paranoid(**) for asking the obvious (***) sock puppet who pays their VPN whilst also writing a sentence that appears to be a third party's comment on your analysis and which refers to you in the third person.

(*) Something to reflect on?

(**) Very much a hallmark of the pop-up poster advocating against control measures, that.

(***) I mean come on - if you're genuine why on earth would you call me paranoid over this new entry to the forums; aside from being brand new, being straight in to politics and Covid and having the absolutely classic posting style of everyone's favourite sock puppet, they've signed up for two sequential accounts with almost the same name.  Totally obvious sock puppet stuff.  Stating the absolutely obvious is not paranoia in my book...

You need to work on your counting.  Half a week ago I compiled parts of the responses from five different posters to you, to help a new poster understand why you were getting a hard time, and to help them understand that it was about your analysis not your conclusions.  (Aside:  I rather suspect their professed lack of understanding was rather disingenuous)

https://www.ukhillwalking.com/forums/off_belay/covid_adverse_affects-737732?v=...

If I was to compile a similar list now it would have considerably more posters on it.  It's not 3 or 4 Tom, it's about a dozen I reckon.

I don't think any of the posters are organising to gang up on you, they're taking the time to give you their perspective on your analysis.  That all the views sound so similar could be taken as a sign of how obvious the flaw is to most people, rather than a gang-up.  

Have you considered that it might be a gaping flaw, not a gang-up?

To me, that is not the fundamental point.  The fundamental point is the nature of the YCS data.  When that is considered, everything flows from there.

Everyone stated it very politely, with good explanations and it's been like a brick wall.  It's not name calling - it's not you being critiqued but the method.  It's not appropriate.  Sticking to it doesn't reflect well on IMO you but we've still not degenerated to name calling.  I called it f*cking stupid, nobody else did, be fair to the res.

Just read what you wrote here, honestly.  

You claim not to have known of the YCS a couple of days ago, and now you're expert enough discard the riders they attach to the data?

Why it's not appropriate is blindingly, spectautralry obvious to many posters here, as well as explained all over the place.  Reading the discussion of the ZOE derived study the Lancet, their discussion is still heavily caveated with these factors, after they try and control them.

Well, about a dozen people have tried rational critiques and made no progress.  I see no bullshit, name calling is a stretch and the memes are just me - be fair to the others.

So that a whole team of medical statisticians and epidemiologists can trawl through it and look for any signals that indicate actual side effects.  Hint - they don't just compare the ratios of non-longitudinal summary level data.

I'm never a fan of analogies in attempting to teach granny to suck eggs, er sorry to convey complex statistical points.  The rest of your post just drives that point home...

Ah ok, you thought I was comparing the efficacy of the 2 vaccines. I suppose my use of the word 'only' for AZ and not Pfizer could have implied that. Tbh I wouldn't qualify either of those numbers as 'dramatic' in terms of reduced immunity but Nathan has reiterated his view that they are which is fair enough.

Honestly? There's about 400 posts above explaining this.

It is a record of any harm that occurs following a vaccination. There will be some caused by the vaccination and some that are merely co-incident.

It is necessary to separate out those that are co-incident from those that are real. This should be done by experts with access to the data.

The experts have done this, and one consequence is not vaccinating young people with AZ due to blood clot risk.

Notice how this was identified and dealt with, but for example blindness has not been. Is blindness a Westminster cover up? or have experts been able to work out that blindness has not been caused by the vaccines and therefore its presence on the list IS NOT INDICATIVE OF ACTUAL SIDE EFFECTS

So hopefully now you can see why 'the f*ck' they collect it, and also see that it is not indicative of actual side effect, but if there are side effect they will be present in the list.

I think the only way to bottom this out is to do our own proper study into the 2 sets of side effects.
Here's my proposed design:
Dosing regime:
We'll give vaccine A to some very old people, and some medics who happen to be kicking around after hours when we've spare doses. Then we'll give vaccine B to everyone from 75ish down through middle-age to about 40. Then a few months later we'll start giving vaccine A to people under 40, but we'll publish the results before they've had their second dose.
Data collection:
We'll collect reports of side effects through a website that's accessible to anyone around the world, whether or not they've had a vaccine.
We'll put the details of the website in the small print of the leaflets we hand out that nobody will read. We might tell some people about it, maybe.
We won't put any time information with them so some of the doses will have months longer in people's systems than others while they randomly get ill with something else.
Controls:
Control? Oh sweetie no. No, no control. Randomised? no. Double blind? Not even single.
Analysis:
Divide reactions from A by reactions from B and take it to the bank.
I reckon it'll get us on the front page of Nature, don't you?

Dear god. For someone expending so much time on this how on earth have you not bothered understanding the basics.

Its collected because it might, just, might be indicative of actual side effects once properly analysed and by that I dont just mean you or me having a quick look at the figures and announcing x is larger than y.

To take your burger king and McDonalds example. This is another good example of how imperfect information can be problematic. I remember reading an article by an environmental health worker saying how people often get it wrong about where they got food poisoning since they dont realise it can take several days to kick in and just blame the last place they ate instead.

Hence why env health basically do the same as the yellow card system but on a local level with far fewer confusing factors. They ask for several days worth of information and then look for overlaps. If a place crops up a lot they then pop round to see whether it is chance or not.

You missed out the bit where we invest heavily in the shares of the company producing Vaccine A before issuing the pre-print.

That does look more likely than Tom being all the other pop-up kranks. Easy done.

What were the Mikes created for I wonder, fire support to get him off this particular hill or just building up a portfolio of puppets for IndyRefII?

The last 18 months have done weird things to this place.

jk

Young people in the UK did not get AZ. I can't say that any more clearly after a dozen attempts. It is all you need to know your 'analysis' is far too simplistic to be enlightening.

jk

Nobody is saying they did.

But the implication that young people don't file reports at the same level as old people and this is why Pfizer has half the report rate of AZ is not true.  Moderna was only given to young people and the level of reports per dose for Moderna isn't that different to the level of reports for AZ. 

Also it seems likely that 10 million of the 32 million doses of Pfizer were in arms by the beginning of March.   The EU stated it delivered 10 million doses of vaccine to the UK by March 9th,  That means 1/3 of the Pfizer went in really old and sick people.  

The 'it is just age related' explanation is not holding water.

The simple explanation is that Pfizer is just a really good jag.

We live in hope

There are far *less* confusing factors because all the noise is smoothed out when you are dealing with tens of millions of people and thousands of reports.  It isn't about one McDonalds it is about the entire chain.  

The amount of work you have to do before you can be sure there is an effect depends on the size of the effect.  Some of these effects are huge. 

Jesus wept, we did this a week ago. Some of the reports are side effects of the vaccine. Some are side effects of the vaccination process. Some are coincidental.

The people reporting can't know which.

If you don't collect them all you don't have any data to work with to monitor the side effects. Side effects which will be there but which have to be carefully unpicked from the rest of the coloured noise.

Not necessarily. It could be Burger king sold 6 times as many burgers that were actually a bit cleaner than McD's. Or they sold them to different demographics with different health. Or that there was some sort of mass panic about BK started on the internet by an irresponsible fool leading to radically different rates of reporting or big-Ron could be running a viral misinformation campaign dribbling through social media, propagated and re-packaged by an army of useful idiots. Or the BK burgers could have rat shit in them. Or some messy combination of all the above. You can't say without more investigation, even guessing based on the headline figure alone is unwise especially if you then amplify big-Ron's message for him based on flawed intuition and nudges from other idiots.

Finally, the penny is dropping. Or not.

The experts' caveats are on top of the data you reference, you're refusing to believe them. You're making a proper fool of yourself. Just stop, take a break, retire the sock-puppets and come back to a thread where you've not dug yourself a massive collapsing hole. I appreciate this isn't fun for you but honestly, at this point it is your fault, you keep doubling down on a flawed position.

jk

Younger people aren't as sick as older people, vaccine or not.

Incidentally, you're shooting at your own flawed argument here, you're arguing the different vaccine technologies are the cause of the differences in yellow card reporting rates but Pfizer and Moderna use the same mRNA tech.

The mean age of AZ recipients will be significantly higher than for Pfizer because no young people got AZ. That is your confounder.

It might be. It might not. You haven't come close to proving either.

jk

Your whole point is nonsense:

a. if we were seeing 10% or 20% more reports we would need to have a carefully constructed experiment to be sure there was something real.  900% more reports for some diseases is like getting slapped in the face with a haddock.  You don't need a precise experiment to know it happened.   

b. nobody is looking to publish a paper in Nature.  My intention is to form a reasonable working hypothesis to guide decisions in the absence of complete data.   If you wait until somebody does the full analysis you have exposed yourself to risk for the months it takes for that to happen.

That is not strictly speaking true. My at the time of their  jab 20 year old and 24 year old daughter had AZ. I know one guy whose 13 year old son had it ( cancer).I recollect they were jabbing 12-18 years olds with serious medical conditions.My daughter had their jabs in March /April.

There were from memory about 2.5 to 3 million young people who had AZ as they were classed as medically vulnerable. This ranged from asthma to more serious stuff.

Ok, I got tired of adding the caveat almost to no young people. My mistake, I should have seen that coming.

Yes, sick people who happen to be young but who would sadly still be expected to be sick after their AZ jab.

jk

I can't prove the mean age of AZ recipients is not somewhat higher than the mean age of Pfizer recipients.  But I can't see how it can be *vastly* higher because Pfizer was used first and the oldest were done first and a lot of the younger people have not had both doses yet.

It would need to be a lot higher to explain some of the really large differences in reports.

I don't claim to have proof.  I claim there is sufficient indication to switch the operating assumption from 'AZ and Pfizer are much the same in terms of safety' to 'Pfizer is a fair bit safer'.

At some point in the future when someone with access to all the data about who got what jab looks at the numbers maybe they will find some other effect and that operating assumption will get switched back.

Almost was quite a large number. It was easily a couple of million.

The sick people included huge numbers of asthmatics just using inhalers.I suspect they were most of that number. Quite a good test as to the efficacy of the AZ.

Anyway I will leave you to it.By the way they have been double jabbed for a good few months.

wtaf? That point is in the past. They've done that. It's been done. We've been telling you this for two whole threads now.

I forgot a step

Then we'll load the international press with reports of 1 in a million side effects from vaccine B and encourage people to turn the hypochondria up to 11, and keep mentioning the reporting system

Registered 1st August, only replied to this and a Brexit item - FAKE, FAKE, FAKE.

Why don't you trolls just p!ss off ?

You should know.

You really ought to see a shrink, split personality is one thing, but you've got so many different persons (although just one personality) running around in your brain that your head's going to explode if you're not careful.

I gagged so hard yesterday tickling my tonsils for my LFT that it hurt some muscle down in my lower chest. You'd think having been doing it twice weekly for 6 months I'd have got better at it, but there you go - still always unpleasant sometimes painful. Side effects/risks. Science. Data. Innit?

The US tried weaponising Marburg back in the cold war if you really want stuff of nightmares. I remember reading about it in this amazing report on bioweapons that got produced by some brilliant Congressional Office of Scientific Research, or some name like that, that got shut down by the Republicans back in the Gingrich era IIRC - because they didn't like evidence based neutral research... :-|

You'd think crazy ideas like that were confined to Hollywood movies. Sadly not. 

I think a lot of the most vulnerable very old got AZ as well: if they couldn't travel to a centre, so had to be done on home visits.

This thread has become very sad. There is no way we can know about comparative side effects 'top trumps' from the yellow card system but it was always known since we had mass vaccination that the risk of side-effects was much lower compared to the risks of the range of problems from catching covid; that's ignoring the fact that vaccination seems to be the only way out of this delta phase of the pandemic. All the vaccines approved in the west are very effective vaccines where serious side effects are rare. That's not the case for all potentially life saving drugs.

You really do.

You don't need to, almost everyone is vaccinated already and we get what we get. The people with the complete data have done the analysis. You're just adding fuel to the antivaxers' bullshit bonfire by trying (and failing) to legitimise the claim that yellow card reports proportionately represent side effects.

jk

Seconded.

^ This.

I've had 2 doses of AZ, but it may be after proper analysis it's decided that for future boosters another vaccine is more effective.

I couldn't care less if that is produced by AZ, Pfizer, Moderna or Braveheart-Freedom-Krankie PLC.

Latest LFT box that we've received is up the nose only (and different procedure with the swizzle stick and the drops).

I'll need an LFT tomorrow so I'll use that one and the Mrs can use up the rest of the old style since she's ok with the tickling.

OMG is this thread still going?

Im with you. In fact I'm so confident that this junk is safe I'm happy to be tester number one for the new BFK vaccine. Sign me up!

Thanks for clarifying. Yes, I read that as you being happy that one but not the other had a “dramatic” impact. 

It is. You don't want to read it but somehow you can't help yourself.

Any evidence of that?
Plenty for the USSR developing it as a weapon , but none for the USA as far as I can see.

During the cold war, both sides were into researching bioweapons - haven't got any evidence but think about it - if you knew, or seriously suspected that the other side was doing this then you'd have to do it too - if only to investigate possible defences.

The US military has a huge many $billions "hidden" budget - can't remember what it's called and I don't think the actual budget amount is hidden, just what it's for. Basically it's their research budget; any nasty way you can think of to hurt people, or a defence against such - chances are someone there will have already thought of it and spent mega-bucks working out whether it's a viable possibility or not.

Although they may not be currently doing anything in the bioweapons arena, the knowledge previously gained hasn't been lost and they'll have some fairly decent freezers.

Have can you test defences against a bioweapon you don’t have?  I’d be surprised if the Soviet weaponisation research - and likely some people - hadn’t ended up in the West and been realised as a basis for understanding the threat, even if there was genuinely no intent to weaponise it themselves.

It’s the same reason that we have hypervelocity impactors based on light has guns and multi-stage rocket trains, and that we have atomic bomb simulators.

We’ll never know.  Mushroom principle and all that.  But the threat remains - and one thing the response to covid has done is to underline how pis poor readiness in most countries is for a secret attack with a biological agent.  That’s the scariest parts of covid for me going forwards; perhaps someone, somewhere who previously thought the academic, industrial and technological powers of the west would render a bio-attack impossible are now re-thinking their stance. 

I never understood when the IRA were bombing the mainland back in the 70/80's, why they didn't do something simpler and just poison a water supply or two. Even back then there must have been some screening of water "quality" but there must have been chemicals that could get through - doesn't even have to be deadly, just has to cause inconvenience or even just massive disruption in countering the threat.

Obviously it would need something that works when massively diluted, would Phenolphthalein have been a strong enough laxative? The run on bog-rolls would have been genuine - if people could get there in time 💩

I think they did try the equivalent of your reservoir suggestion with the substation attacks, and got pretty close.  As far as I can tell, defence against and robustness with respect to distributed substation attack remains a pretty clear weakness.  

> The run on bog-rolls would have been genuine - if people could get there in time 💩

That sort of thing leads to it exiting like a firehose without ever touching the sides? 

Where you around back when Bruce Hooker used to accuse Toby of working for the CIA? 

What you've been saying is DONT LOOK AT THOSE NUMBERS.

Nobody has provided a link to an authoritative analysis of the numbers.   A few people have provided speculative theories about demographics which don't hold up.

That was a very late campaign and only got partially underway with the substations and various other infrastructure.  As tactics go hitting key infrastructure in a way which causes maximum disruption but minimal loss of life would make the most sense by seriously inconveniencing people but avoiding killing people and hence triggering a serious backlash.

Jesus wept, Tom.

I thought you’d decided to drop this, I really did.

The god damned data comes with a disclaimer saying you can’t use it to do this kind of analysis.

Although you haven’t put any kind of probability on “don’t hold up” by any kind of scientific method so you’re just going “lalala” against the single most consistent response I’ve seen from a broad number of UKC posters, ever.

Go to your profile, “forum options”, “Opt-out of specific Forums” and check yourself out of Off Belay and get a good night’s sleep.

The idea that the YCS data is a proportionate representation of side effects is total bullshit.  The data itself explains this in simple words.  Every time you insist otherwise you go against the expert opinion and every single person to have posted on the subject here other than the clear sock puppets (if they’re yours, please delete them).   It’s worse than that though, because the assertion you make - this somehow relate in a quantitatively comparable way to side effects - is a core tenant of the anti-vax movement.  You don’t want to support them, do you?  If you end up needing the same woefully dumb interpretation of data, you really need to reflect on that.

I’m out (of memes).

I would suggest giving up on them. They are clearly incapable of understanding the purpose of the yellow card scheme and the limitations of the raw data.

Don't mention the Falklands War, I mentioned it once, but I think I got away with it...  

If the people with the complete data have done the analysis why has nobody provided a link to their publications?

The only thing my analysis requires is that the 'noise' affects the different vaccines in fairly similar ways.   Even of you got 2x more false reports on AZ than Pfizer it wouldn't explain 9x more reports for some symptoms.

Just because both vaccines are massively preferable to no vaccine does not mean they are equally effective or equally safe.   Which is not a point about vax or no vax.  AZ could be 2x less safe than Pfizer and still 100 or 1000x safer than catching Covid without being vaccinated.

You are right in that for the UK the point is pretty much moot because the UK government has to all intents and purposes switched to Pfizer and Moderna.   The US uses Pfizer and Moderna and so does the EU.  For all the rearguard action getting fought on UKC the rich countries have pretty much dropped AZ.

And what you've been doing is LOOKING AT THEM

Jesus wept.

They threw bikes or just long chains over the fences to short them out across the exposed terminals. Different fences, larger compounds, insulators etc.. reduced the risk. But there are of course still weak links. There is a section within MI5 dedicated to critical national infrastructure. 

Jesus H Christ....

It was published a while ago in this really obscure journal called The News that we all read and you obviously don't.

We've also repeatedly told you to read anything at all by the MHRA (who, by the way, are NOT the tories). Anything. Just read something. Maybe start here:

https://www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/covid-19-vaccines-updates-for-july-20...

Then have a crack at googling it for yourself. 

​​​​​​And when that time has passed and if the proper analysis has been done it may turn out that there is a significant difference in the side effects and it may not.

If the former happens I expect you will claim vindication but this will be misplaced as your methodology is flawed. 

​​​​​​What will you do if the latter happens?

​​​​​​The reality is of course likely to be far less black and white and much more nuanced than there is/is not a difference.

Hahahahhahahhahaha.

I don't know if you've read any of the other posts, but the noise is unlikely to be the same and at this point none of us know the extent of the difference.

You think you know, but you don't. This is why the people who run the scheme put a note at the top of the release, to try to help people who don't understand. That note was for you.

Holy crap, yeah, I just noticed this paragraph. Haven't laughed like this in a while. 

+1 what bridgstarr said.

That note was to cover their arses.  They probably put the same boilerplate on every release of this type of report.

Nobody has suggested any reason why in some cases the number of reports would be 9x larger for one vaccine than the other or the overall number of reports would be 2x greater per person jagged for AZ than Pfizer.

In one of the cases where there is a 5x difference in the number of reports we know for sure there was an actual effect - the AZ blood clots.   There are others with even larger spreads in reports.

And  when I actually read through the reams of stuff on that MHRA website what do I find:

"Up to and including the 28 July 2021, the MHRA has received 372 reports of Guillain-Barre Syndrome with the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca and 20 reports of a related disease called Miller Fisher syndrome. Up to the same date, the MHRA has received 39 reports of Guillain-Barre Syndrome following use of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and for the COVID-19 Vaccine Moderna there have been two reports of Guillain-Barre Syndrome. Please note that due to the dynamic nature of the Yellow Card data these figures may change both as new cases are received, and as duplicate cases are identified and managed.

As a precautionary measure, the MHRA will be adding a warning on Guillain-Barré Syndrome to the product information of the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca."

That's the one with 9x more reports for AZ I keep going on about.

You lot have been slagging me off and calling me a moron for coming to the same conclusion as the MHRA i.e. when one vaccine gets a f*ckton more reports than the other there's maybe something wrong.

No, we've been slagging you off for doing moronic things with data you don't understand, having ignored the caveats at the top of it that tell you not to do exactly what you keep insisting is fine.

It's not to cover their arses. It's because the report covers any harm that occurs in a period after the injection. This will very obviously include an enormous number of non vaccine related harm. This is so blindingly obvious that I can't believe you honestly don't understand it

I don't need to give you a reason to explain the difference between the reporting. I would expect a significant difference if the same vaccine was given to two different cohorts. Unless I had the ability to resolve the reason for those differences I would be very careful about making any judgements.

I'm not sure you've come to the same conclusion about MRHA, and even if you did, it would be by luck rather than judgement. You can be quite sure their methodology is not the same as yours

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-vaccine-adv...

Many suspected ADRs reported on a Yellow Card do not have any relation to the vaccine or medicine and it is often coincidental that they both occurred around the same time. The reports are continually reviewed to detect possible new side effects that may require regulatory action, and to differentiate these from things that would have happened regardless of the vaccine or medicine being administered, for instance due to underlying or undiagnosed illness.

No, we’ve been saying your analysis method is dumb and that the YCS and MHRA say “ do not do this”.

You haven’t mentioned that particular syndrome once.  No, text searched to check my memory.  

What MHRA will have done and what you have not done is to look at the full data on people reporting that disease and the demographically matched prevalence of cases of that disease for each candidate, and asked “are the number of cases being reported above those expected” for each candidate. I bet you they didn’t try and use one to control for the other by doing a ratio.

Note how there are far fewer outputs from that process than inputs from the YCS raw data?

Tom is very carefully not applying his methodology to draw conclusion from the line items in the YCS raw data which are higher for Pfizer than AZ.  

It’s one I want to tear in to with a worked example, but doing so would require me treating the YCS data as a proportionate sampling of side effects, and I can’t bring myself to do it.

Probably yes, because unverified, uncontrolled self-report medical data tends to share the characteristics of being unverified, uncontrolled and self-reported. Who’d have thunk it?

Similarly, every brand of drain cleaner in Tesco has a “do not ingest” label on it. Must just be meaningless boilerplate and nothing to take any notice of…

Whether or not you agree with the reasons suggested (demographic confounds, reliability issues in the data, etc, etc) it’s quite clearly another outright lie to say that no one has suggested any reason there might be differences in the reporting rates.

You don't have to; the MHRA have conveniently given a thoroughly analysed example in the link I posted above: https://www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/covid-19-vaccines-updates-for-july-20...

Of course I understand it.  What I don't understand is why that effect would for some symptoms be differentially many times greater for one vaccine than the other.

The way the MHRA wrote that paragraph, I reckon they think 392 reports for AZ to 39 reports for Pfizer on Guillain-Barre syndrome is a concern too.

Some might say this was f*cking obvious.

And again, obviously these are tiny numbers compared to the number of jags and Covid is massively more risky so it is not any kind of reason for not getting vaccinated.   But it could be a reason to select one jag rather than the other, if you had the choice.

You really are making a fool of yourself here. Just to simplify things for you.

No one is saying there may not be AZ specific issues. Indeed some have made it clear they would expect some vaccines to have different side effects.

What people are repeatedly pointing out but you seem incapable of understanding that pointing at part of the raw data is moronic. It needs processing with lots of additional information which we dont have available for it to be useful.

Which is what the MHRA does. You can see this in action by the changes in policy over the last year about who gets what and the current question marks about what to do about teenagers. Simply pointing at one input into this process and making announcements is moronic.

You are doing the exact same thing as the anti vax morons but just on a slightly narrower basis driven by your ideological hatred of England vs ideological hatred of something or other for the anti vax morons.

Didn't say the name but I said 9x many times. If you'd looked at the OP with the symptoms it would have been obvious which one.

This is what they said:

"Up to and including the 28 July 2021, the MHRA has received 372 reports of Guillain-Barre Syndrome with the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca and 20 reports of a related disease called Miller Fisher syndrome. Up to the same date, the MHRA has received 39 reports of Guillain-Barre Syndrome following use of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine and for the COVID-19 Vaccine Moderna there have been two reports of Guillain-Barre Syndrome. ........

As a precautionary measure, the MHRA will be adding a warning on Guillain-Barré Syndrome to the product information of the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca."

Their text quotes the numbers for the two jags and then says they decided to give a warning as a precautionary measure.  That looks to me like they are explaining what they did with the size of the ratio.

They didn't arrive at that f*cking obvious conclusion the same way you did. They didn'r compare AZ to Pfizer numbers. They compared AZ to what would be expected from the same cohort. They didn't choose the 'f*cking obvious' method, because it is very often wrong

And what was their conclusion? Not that there's a causal link, but that it's one to keep an eye on. I don't think that's the same conclusion you came to.

You said lots of other numbers, too - and it’s been their on their website for some time.  We only have your claim you hadn’t read it before commenting. I rather think the rest of us had read it all and were aware of all the conditions the MHRA have got on there whilst we were pointing out the flaw in your method.

Jesus wept, Tom.

Jesus f*****g wept.

Have you read their determinations for things they classify as actual side effects?  They look at gender and age matched prevalence and the longitudinal YCS data.  Here despite your masterful 9x analysis, the actual experts with their team of epidemiologists and statisticians and longitudinal data haven’t drawn the link you have been consistently claiming for all side effects.

What the MHRA say:

Based on the available evidence at this stage we are not able to confirm or rule out a causal relationship with the vaccine.

As a precautionary measure, the MHRA will be adding a warning on Guillain-Barré Syndrome to the product information of the COVID-19 Vaccine AstraZeneca.

Well I'm reading what they wrote and that is not what it says.

It gives the numbers for Pfizer and AZ and then it says they are adding a warning to the product information for AZ.

They could have not mentioned Pfizer at all and written "and we compared the figure for AZ to what we would have expected from the cohort'.  Why didn't they write it that way if that is what they did?

You honestly think that they literally just went off the raw numbers and did no further analysis than the brief summary descriptives quoted? You reckon that is a thorough statement of methodology and they didn’t even bother to account for number of doses given? That is the conclusion you are going with? 

Although I think it was Mossad more often than the CIA! Ahhh... the good old days before sock puppets and pop up accounts where you just got accused of being a member of an intelligence agency - presumably being productive on your lunch hour. By the way, I never thought Tom in Edinburgh was anyone besides Tom in Edinburgh. I thought his reference to himself in the third person yesterday that led to the sock puppetry accusations, was just an elegant rhetorical device. Still disagree with you mind, Tom! But there's clearly <sings> only one Tom in Edinburgh/ONE TOM in Edinburgh!/One Tom in Edinbrruuuuuh!</sings>

Their descriptions of methodology for determined side effects are clear including in a recent link.

This makes it clear what kind of professional standards they hold themselves to.

Where something is not evidenced enough to be confirmed, do you think they are applying their professional methods and getting an answer of “not significant”, or do you think instead some intern is dividing two numbers in an excel spreadsheet?

Jesus wept.

You've jumped to that conclusion. They specifically say they don't do it like that. Read it again and you'll see where you missed it.

This is from researching something I wrote nearly 20 years ago - so you could well be right. I thought the US tried to weaponise it though as well, but perhaps they were just looking at the chance that the USSR would weaponise it. I might even find out if I can find this semi suppressed report - I think the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists republished it to keep it in the public domain. It was fascinating because it pointed out how difficult it was to weaponsie many biological agents and some chemical agents, they reckoned for example if they were sprayed from a plane, things as simple as if it was a sunny day could have a massive impact on whether it was a "WMD" killing or injuring large numbers or more just an annoyance. Doing the research made me definitely less worried about non-state actors getting biological and chemical agents, as was such a fear immediately post 9/11.

Cor, that looks awfully nuanced and scientific and no sign of dividing numbers from different vaccines.  Shock horror.

However I meant a slightly different one - a YCS entry with more prevalence in the Pfizer gated reports than the AZ ones, that is not identified as a warning or a side effect.  But one that is more common in those receiving Pfizer.  If Tom believed his analysis, he would have to ascribe this as a more prevalent side effect of Pfizer.  However it seems to me that as pregnancy is strongly correlated with age, the demographics would skew unrelated incidence of this effect towards the Pfizer cohort.

It sounds like Bruce was close to the mark :-o

I did mention that one in the previous thread including a comment about an obvious potential explanation was due to age bias (which someone added to with that it was being advised all pregnant women go with Pfizer/Moderna).

Needless to say Tom was happy to conclude in that case that simple number counting was the wrong approach.

Well I'm happy to take an example: Congenital penoscrotal fusion. AZ 3 - 0 Pfizer. So the only possible conclusion is that you're infinity times more likely to have been born with a webbed chappie if you had the AZ vaccine. 

Ah, so it’s “choose your method to support your conclusion week”?  I missed that memo, was still busy with the one about the cover sheet for the TPS reports…

That's worth more than a thumbs up, it really tickled me

Me to. 

I think Longsufferingropeholder's otherwise superfluous analysis is flawed however; as it would mean that all men to have received the AZ dose must suffer from this condition.  I think he many need to re-normalise some infinities in there somewhere....  Because, as we've seen applying more analysis to fundamentally flawed data does in fact produce a meaningful output...

Well I didn't come up with the method, I just copied it from above. So if my analysis is flawed, then you know who else's is?

So it follows that we can definitively say that one of these statements is true: either Tom has done the analysis wrong, or everyone who had the AZ vaccine has a webbed knob.

However safe and effective your first AZ vaccine course was, there are good theoretical reasons for having a booster of a different type.  If it were available, I might go for a viral protein or inactivated virus (Sinovac) after an AZ course.  This is nothing to do with safety, but trying to further prod the immune response through a different route.

As a further consideration, a BioNTech/Pfizer booster arguably might avoid the possibility of generating more reaction against the adenoviral vector used in the AZ.  By the same token, an AZ booster after a Pfizer course might reduce the risk of a reaction against the PEG in the Pfizer LNP composition. 

All slightly hypothetical, but in an an ideal world...  In our less than ideal world all these boosters should be going to countries where they haven't had the luxury of a first immunisation yet.

Despite my alleged English vaccine nationalism [...], I am hopeful I can get a booster from the French designed, Scottish made Valneva inactivated virus vaccine.  Shown to produce a broad T-cell response against multiple viral proteins.  Clinical trial on-going for its role as a 3rd "booster"  and the UK's order was raised to 100m doses some months ago.

Then again, schools go back long before I could likely get it, so I may well have a board T-cell response by then anyhow :-|

Nothing so exciting I'm afraid, I was doing my PhD and working as a researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs. The nice people at the Centre for Security Studies at ETH Zurich seem to have kept a copy of the working paper that came out of my musings at that time! https://css.ethz.ch/en/services/digital-library/publications/publication.ht...

I remember reading How to Build a Nuclear Bomb and other Weapons of Mass Destruction by Frank Barnaby before I wrote that paper, and then asking on here what maraging steel was, and how big and expensive an air cooled lathe was - Barnaby said if you get the uranium, then that's almost all you need to make a functioning bomb! One of the engineers on here found me an ebay listing for a second hand lathe of the right type in a couple of hours - and various people explained about the type of steel (I seem to remember being told its used in golf clubs?) but there was much amusement when I revealed why I was asking!   The good old days of the internet and UKC (might I have still just been Rockfax back then!).

F-I-I-A?  There're three letters between 'F' and 'I'; if I use the first 'I' as a sign to go back three letters from the 'F' I get to 'C'.  So, FIIA -> CIA.  

Slamming two sub-critical masses together?  The lathe seems a bit professional like.  

I shall have to read your paper later, I like the abstract - WMD as a social construct; it's certainly a term that continues to be used for overt politicking with very little relation to the board spectrum of underlying nasties.

I don't know if you still move in similar circles, but the future of fusion weaponry is an interesting subject; historically the difficulty of building a sufficiently advanced fission bomb to trigger the fusion has been sufficient to put them out of reach of all but large states, and it has - seemingly - made it very hard to hide that work.  But the times there may be changing soon enough.

A childhood back in the 80s with home science experiments enhanced by helpful how to guides circulated on Amiga floppy disks feels very far removed from the sensibilities of the modern world.

I had a quick flick through my paper to see if I could find where I had read about Marburg virus, although I don't seem to have mentioned it. I might be in the Barnaby book - I have my copy somewhere, I'll look it up when I have a mo'.

Very much different circles these days, although I did end up subscribing to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists for a few years after that - I even had a T-shirt from them with the minutes of midnight clock on it - cheery eh?! So no, don't know anything about new fusion technology - is there some way to start the chain reaction now without needing to use a uranium bomb? Would it be something like lasers when they've tried to experiment with fusion power?

There's a whole host of stuff under R&D for power these days - not just big field coils and lasers, but electrostatic and Z-pinch confinement, muon catalysis (really cool), confinement by steam hammer induced shockwaves in swirling, molten lead (General Fusion) and various configurations of very compact field coils.  There's also perhaps some ambiguity over the state of the art in storing way beyond chemical levels of energy with gamma fluorescence.  Rank speculation but  I'd be surprised if somewhere in that list of buzzwords there wasn't a combination that is eventually going to open up a more weapons like possibility; perhaps muon catalysis combined with a high field, compact device...  Rank speculation on my behalf, but it's a rapidly moving world.

Not as cheery as a more recent T-shirt I expect...

Hear, hear! This really is one of those 'first world problems'. Though naturally I'll gratefully accept any booster jag that's offered.

Thokka thokka thokka...

That's the sound black helicopters make...

Nobody has come up with a reason to think the demographics for AZ and Pfizer are so different it could explain the vast differences in reports for some symptoms.   The age thing might have done it - except that the oldest and sickest actually got Pfizer.  Equally obviously, deciding not to give AZ to younger women is relevant for symptoms related to pregnancy.  Find something like that for the other symptoms and I will pay attention.

Of course you need to scale by the number of jags rather than just use compare raw report counts.  But when you get a 4x, 5x or 9x effect the number of jags 47.5 million Pfizer to 32.1 million AZ doesn't come close to explaining it.

You guys should give up on this one.   Any sensible person looking at 9x more reports for a specific symptom from one jag vs the other and not seeing an obvious confounding factor is going to think there's probably a real side effect. 

Could everyone who got the AZ jab just quickly check their undercarriage and decide whether we agree?

The problem is that, other than the obvious sock puppet, everybody commenting disagrees with you.

That doesn’t really fit with your “sensible person” bullshit does it?

It would be easy to appeal to “common sense” to convince people without the most basic understanding of statistics and ageing that the data proves something it does not.

Unless of course those people read the disclaimer in the data specifically stating it can not be used for this kind of analysis.

How can you write off so many people without anything other than a call to sense?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#/media/File:PiratesV...