Home » Business » AstraZeneca side effect or dying of corona: risk is almost the same for young woman | NOW

AstraZeneca side effect or dying of corona: risk is almost the same for young woman | NOW

The low risk of serious side effects from the AstraZeneca vaccine in young women is close to the low risk of dying from COVID-19. Bart-Jan Kullberg, chairman of the Health Council, said this on Thursday evening News hour. According to him, it was therefore not a difficult decision to stop the vaccine, however small the risk in an absolute sense.

From now on, only people over 60 will be vaccinated with (among other things) the AstraZeneca vaccine, decided the cabinet Thursday. For people over 60, the risks of a corona infection are much greater than the risks of the injection.

What’s ‘wrong’ with the AstraZeneca vaccine?

  • Provided: the vaccine provides good protection against COVID-19.
  • There is only a very small chance of a serious side effect: thrombosis in combination with a lack of platelet count. That can be life threatening.
  • The EMA estimates that this side effect occurs in about 1 in 100,000 vaccinees. Suppose the entire city of Delft were to receive the AstraZeneca injection, so one resident would become so ill.



Astra shot relatively high risk for young woman

“You have to look at those risks in the group in question. Of course, vaccination is extremely important and the risks of corona are very high, but that is especially the case for the elderly. We are now talking about the younger group and especially younger women. where there appears to be a relatively high risk of this side effect. “

‘Big’ is relative, Kullberg emphasizes. “A chance of one in a few hundred thousand is of course very small. But young women also have a very small chance of dying from corona, also on the order of one in a half million or one in a million. suddenly very different. Then it is not desirable to give this vaccine to those people. “

EMA sounded more positive on Wednesday

The European Medicines Agency (EMA), which also advises, sounded considerably more positive on Wednesday. The agency acknowledged that the combination of thrombosis and platelet deficiency is a serious side effect, but found that the drawbacks outweigh all the benefits.

Kullberg says about this: “The EMA does not give advice to whom you should give which vaccine. The EMA is examining whether that vaccine is still permissible at all. And they have, of course, rightly said: ‘Yes, it is.’ Because it has major advantages, despite these very small disadvantages and side effects. The EMA does not advise whether and where it should be used. The implementing parties do that: the countries, with advice from the Health Council in the Netherlands. “

‘We are not a collection of scientists in an office’

Last weekend there was criticism from Dutch thrombosis experts, who complained that they had not been involved in the cabinet decision to take another puncture break to further investigate the AstraZeneca side effects.

Yet it is not the case that they are not involved at all in Dutch decision-making, Kullberg emphasizes. “The Health Council is not a collection of scientists in an office. They are people from practice: experts from the UMCs and universities. And for advice like this, they are internist infectiologists, doctors in geriatric medicine, thrombosis experts, medication safety experts, plus for example, an ethicist, a virologist. So they are practitioners who also make a scientific contribution to such advice. “

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