The Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) has issued new guidance today saying that adults aged 30 to 39 without underlying health conditions should be offered an alternative to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. MailOnline has more.
Britons under 40 should be offered an alternative to the Oxford/AstraZeneca Covid vaccine due to its link to rare blood clots, health officials announced today.
Advisers made the recommendation after more adults suffered the potentially-fatal clotting disorder in the past week.
They said the absolute risk of the clots is still “extremely small”, affecting around one in 100,000 people given the British-made jab.
So far regulators have spotted major blood clots in 242 people, of whom 49 died. But they are occurring more in younger adults, with a rate of around one in 60,000 under-40s.
Experts said the infection rate in the UK is now so low that the risk of the rare clots outweigh that of Covid in younger adults, who often only suffer mild illness. They will be offered the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines instead.
That final point is interesting. Does it mean that health officials have calculated that the risk of dying from a blood clot after being receiving the AZ jab is greater than the risk of someone under-40 with no underlying health conditions dying from Covid? To date, 49 people have died from blood clots after being given the AZ vaccine. If we assume that at least a half of the 35 million Britons who’ve been inoculated got an AZ jab (a conservative assumption), that means the risk of dying from a blood clot after receiving the AZ vaccine is ~49/17,500,000.
So is the JCVI saying that the risk of someone under-40 with no underlying health conditions dying from COVID-19 is < 49/17,500,000?
Even I hadn’t realised the risk was quite so infinitesimally small.
Worth reading in full.
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