While the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID-19 is gradually being rolled out across Canada, several European countries have abruptly halted its use because of alleged health risks:
Spain, Germany, France and Italy have become the latest European countries to temporarily halt the rollout of the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine over a small number of blood clot concerns, going against the advice of international medical agencies as a third wave of infections looms over the continent.
Spain will stop using the vaccine for two weeks, the country's Health Minister Carolina Darias announced in a nationally televised news conference Monday.
It's a "temporary and precautionary" suspension, she said, "until the risks can be evaluated by the European Medicines Agency."
After initially standing by the safety of the vaccine, German health minister Jens Spahn said Monday that the country would pause inoculations as a precaution, following reports of a handful of cases of blood clots in people vaccinated with the AstraZeneca shot in Denmark and Norway.
France and Italy also halted their rollouts of the vaccine Monday, pending review by the EU's medicines regulator, the European Medicines Agency (EMA), although the body later reiterated its advice that countries stick to the rollout.
"We have decided to suspend the use of AstraZeneca as a precautionary measure and are hoping to resume it quickly if the EMA's advice allows it," French President Emmanuel Macron said at Monday news conference.
The suspensions came hours after prosecutors in northern Italy ordered a batch of the vaccine to be seized, citing a man who fell ill and died after taking a shot. Italy's medicines agency also suspended the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine "as a precaution and temporarily," prior to the EMA meeting, the Italian medicines agency AIFA announced Monday.
For Europe to shut down the use of an effective vaccine against COVID-19 while a “third wave” of the virus washes across the continent, they must be getting alarming reports of people suffering fatal side effects, right?
Um…no:
AstraZeneca doubled down on the safety of its shots Sunday, saying that a careful review of the 17 million people inoculated with it in the EU and Britain found again that there was "no evidence" of a link with clots.
It found that of those millions of people, there have been 15 events of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and 22 events of pulmonary embolism reported after vaccination; lower than the number that would be expected to occur naturally within that population size.
Nonetheless, the death of one woman in Denmark prompted a number of countries to pause their rollouts until reviews have been conducted. The Danish Medicines Agency said on Monday the woman in question had an "unusual" combination of symptoms before she died. [emphasis added]
To paraphrase Tom Wolfe’s old line about fascism, vaccine skepticism is always descending upon America but it lands in Europe. Last year, several studies showed that people in several European countries are very wary of taking a vaccine against COVID-19, and that was before the moral panic over the Oxford vaccine set in.
The health news website Stat says that even if the vaccine is returned to market, its reputation may never recover:
The decisions, even if temporary, are likely to have other ripple effects. They put extraordinary pressure on a large clinical trial of the AstraZeneca vaccine being conducted in the United States, which has not authorized the vaccine’s use. And they raise questions about the rollout of a product that, globally, was expected to be produced most inexpensively and distributed most broadly.
In the wake of the decisions by more countries to suspend the vaccine’s use, the European Medicines Agency called an “extraordinary meeting” on Thursday to analyze the risks of the vaccine.
“While its investigation is ongoing, EMA currently remains of the view that the benefits of the AstraZeneca vaccine in preventing COVID-19, with its associated risk of hospitalisation and death, outweigh the risks of side effects,” the agency said in a statement.
The EMA said that the concern is related to blood clots with “unusual features” including low levels of platelets, which are involved in creating clots. Still both the EMA and AstraZeneca emphasized that the number of blood clot-related events, which could include clots in the legs and also more severe outcomes like heart attacks or strokes, seem not to be higher than the rate seen in the general population.
Sir Richard Peto, an emeritus professor of statistics at the University of Oxford, said that there was no good evidence of a hazard, and that he worried that the Norwegian medical agency, which first raised concerns, is not taking into account the underlying risk of clots. Even if vaccine decreased the risk of blood clots in older people, Peto points out, some blood clots would be expected to occur.
“Unless they’ve got serious evidence of hazard, they shouldn’t put out press statements that will very clearly be taken as evidence of hazard,” Peto said.
Side effect scares are common with vaccines, but they also very often do not pan out. The reason is that so many people receive vaccines that some will experience what seems like a side effect by chance when, really, it is not related to the vaccine at all.
Ironically, this is not unlike the “vaccines cause autism” scare, which spread in no small part because of children being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders not long after they received their childhood vaccines. There is absolutely no evidence that the vaccines caused autism, but many parents had trouble accepting that. And then, serial fraudsters and conspiracy theorists stepped in.
Not surprisingly, Europe’s latest vaccine scare is Christmas come early for anti-vaxxer quacks:
Of course RFK Jr. uses the #BillGates hashtag. He knows his audience. This guy had an uncle who left a woman to drown after a car accident, but somehow he still manages to be the very worst Kennedy.
As for Tucker Carlson, who is just asking questions, his boss had no qualms about getting vaccinated. And I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Carlson, once a serious writer and commentator who decided the real money was in pure cynicism, quietly got the shot himself. The cult leader rarely abides by the strict standards imposed upon his followers.
That said, while Carlson has been shockingly irresponsible at best and malevolent at worst, his show isn’t widely seen in Europe. Over there, it’s not talk-show hosts sabotaging the vaccination campaign, but their governments.
Meanwhile, as we mourn the loss of boxing legend Marvelous Marvin Hagler - “Marvelous” wasn’t just a great nickname, but his legal name, which is one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard in my life - we also have to put up with vaccine-related conspiracy theories about his death:
Apparently this all comes from one Instagram post from another boxing legend, Thomas Hearns. But Hagler’s widow says it isn’t true:
This, of course, is just part of the cover-up:
There’s an old joke about two conspiracy theorists who are killed in an accident and go to Heaven. They get an audience with God, who tells them he will answer any of their questions about the mysteries of the universe. They ask him who really killed JFK, and the Lord responds, “Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.”
One conspiracy theorist turns to his friend and says, “this cover-up goes even higher than we thought.”
Have some people died after getting a COVID-19 vaccine? Of course. It doesn’t make you indestructible:
According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the vaccine's side effects can include pain and swelling in the injected arm, as well as tiredness, headache, muscle pain, chills, fever, and nausea. The CDC has also said that the vaccines are "safe and effective" and that severe side effects are extremely rare.
Over 92 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through March 8, 2021. In that time, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) reported 1,637 deaths among individuals who were injected with a vaccine, according to The CDC. However, there was no evidence linking those deaths to the after-effects of the vaccine.
1,637 deaths after 92 million doses have been administered sounds like pure luck of the draw. Technically it could include someone who left the clinic and got run over by a dump truck, in which case the headline “man dies immediately after getting COVID-19 vaccine” would be technically true.
It’s bad enough when your beloved husband dies. It’s even worse when you have to fight off this garbage while you’re still in mourning.
Unfortunately, fighting off misinformation on the internet takes much more time and effort than spreading it.
Jesse Singal is currently playing whack-a-mole with people grossly misrepresenting his writings on transgender issues, and this Substack post shows the mental toll it’s taking:
Before I get to the main point of this post, I just need to vent for one paragraph: These people are evil liars. That is the only accurate way to describe what they are doing. They are terrible, immoral, awful people. There’s a reason thousands of years’ worth of human legal and moral codes warn against this type of behavior. What they are doing is so, so inexcusable, and it has robbed so many hours from me, between the anxiety and anger it has caused, the time I’ve spent responding to their bullshit, and my unfortunate (but I think human) tendency to get drawn into Twitter fights, sometimes years later, when their garbage claims are regurgitated for the 800th time. It gets exhausting. To be clear, they haven’t won — I’ve been really lucky to see my platform expand so much in the last few years, and even got a bit of a “Doyle bump,” if you could call it that (please let’s call it that), after his nonsense popped off, in the form of a surge of Substack and Patreon subscriptions. But this is still quite harmful: I don’t want to just do stuff for Substack and Patreon. I want to continue writing for mainstream outlets like I’ve been doing for almost a decade and a half. I want to write another book for a mainstream publisher, if I can come up with a worthy idea. How many editors out there now know — KNOW — that I am a terrible, creepy harasser because of these awful, shitty people endlessly repeating these lies and never providing anything like sufficient evidence to justify such claims? Once more: How is this acceptable?
Okay, venting done. The main goal of this post is really to point out just how much time and energy it can take to debunk a single drop of online misinformation during a downpour of it, which is what I’m presently experiencing. I’m going to focus on single tweetstorm by a nonbinary writer named Dianna E. Anderson that is getting a lot of attention and which is being seen by some, at least according to one correspondent, as the definitive takedown of my work. It has gotten almost 800 retweets as of when I’m writing this. (I’m seeing random Google-scraps suggesting we may have had Twitter interactions at one point or another, but I don’t remember ever corresponding with Anderson on any platform.)
It’s incredibly dishonest. It gets the most basic stuff wrong. It’s stuffed with lies. So of course it’s going viral! And now 5,000 or 10,000 or 30,000 or whatever-the-number-is-more-people will be completely misled about my work. Maybe another barrista will tell Reddit I frequent their coffee shop, leading to more people suggesting I be poisoned or have coffee thrown in my face. Misinformation’s a blast. Pileons are great. This is true, meaningful social justice at work.
I’m no expert on this stuff, so it could very well be that Jesse Singal is grossly dishonest and wrong about everything. But so far, he’s the only one who actually posts anything that backs up his side of the story.
Ask his detractors to show their long-promised receipts, and this is the response you’ll get every time: