By Jim Geraghty
Thursday, March 18, 2021
Yesterday, in the context of terrorists attempting to
cross the U.S.-Mexico border, we talked about the conflation of what is rare and what is
impossible.
Strong adverse reactions to the coronavirus vaccines are
rare, but they are not impossible. If you’ve gotten a vaccination already, your
vaccination-event organizers probably had emergency medical personnel standing
by, or the shot was administered at a medical center. If you haven’t, when you
get the shot, they’ll ask you if you’ve ever had a strong adverse reaction to a
shot before, and after getting jabbed, they’ll have you hang around for ten to
15 minutes to make sure you don’t faint or have some other sign of a strong
reaction.
The conclusion you take from a set of data will often
depend upon how those data were presented to you. A series of not necessarily
representative anecdotes, listed one after another, will create the impression
that something happens frequently. To use an example far from the world of
vaccines, this twelve-minute video would probably leave you with the
impression that Sam Darnold is a phenomenally talented quarterback who
had a great 2020 season, and that the Jets would be insane to trade him to
another team. (If you happen to be the general manager of another NFL team,
please study that video thoroughly and call up Jets general manager Joe Douglas
with an offer. And whatever you do, don’t watch the rest of Darnold’s plays
from last year.)
We’re all human, but our DNA contains all kinds of
unusual varieties. Hunting Four Horsemen notes small groups of
human beings who are effectively immune, or nearly immune, to malaria and anthrax.
This is why your doctor can rarely be 100 percent certain that your body will
react to a medication the way it is supposed to, or that you won’t have
unexpected side effects.
Earlier this week, the CDC updated its guidance about adverse reactions to the
vaccines, and noted that more than “109 million doses of COVID-19
vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through
March 15, 2021. During this time, the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System received 1,913
reports of death (0.0018%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.”
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services runs
VAERS, and anyone can submit a report. But the HHS website notes that because
it accepts reports from everyone, not every account should be taken at face value until it’s been
more thoroughly investigated and verified:
While very important in monitoring
vaccine safety, VAERS reports alone cannot be used to determine if a vaccine
caused or contributed to an adverse event or illness. The reports may contain
information that is incomplete, inaccurate, coincidental, or unverifiable. In
large part, reports to VAERS are voluntary, which means they are subject to
biases. This creates specific limitations on how the data can be used
scientifically. Data from VAERS reports should always be interpreted with these
limitations in mind.
If I wanted to freak you out, I could list off all
different kinds of serious reactions that people have reported after receiving
a coronavirus vaccines. The CDC notes that “anaphylaxis — a severe allergic
reaction that can cause the airways to tighten — after COVID-19 vaccination
is rare and occurred in approximately 2 to 5 people per
million vaccinated in the United States based on events reported to VAERS. This
kind of allergic reaction almost always occurs within 30 minutes after
vaccination.”
The reported adverse events include hearing loss . . .
There have been a handful of case
reports of COVID-19 patients having such hearing loss, including a report
in BMJ. But as more COVID-19 vaccines become available,
there are a small but growing number of reports of vaccinated individuals
reporting sudden hearing loss — 14 reports among nearly 31,000 entries (or
0.05%) in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System.
A Phase 1 clinical trial for
Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine included a 21-year-old who experienced
sudden hearing loss 34 days after vaccination. Neither the investigator nor
Johnson & Johnson concluded that the event was linked to the vaccine.
One such case, according to the
CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), involved an
86-year-old who died after receiving his second dose of Pfizer. According to
CDC records, the individual also had a long history of lung and heart issues,
but the doctor reported the correlation anyway “out of abundance of caution.”
Other cases involved stroke, heart
attacks; one couldn’t stop using the bathroom and ultimately died there after
receiving the vaccine.
If you’re vaccinating lots of people who are elderly or
who have serious health conditions, some of them are going to die of old age or
those health conditions after vaccination. People who are at high risk of
stroke or heart attack are still at high risk of stroke or heart attack after
getting vaccinated. These vaccines helps fight off COVID-19, not death in all
its forms.
But it is worth noting that while cases of younger, seemingly healthy people developing serious health
complications and even dying after getting the vaccines are rare, but
not impossible:
The 39-year-old woman, otherwise
healthy, lived in West Point with her 9-year-old daughter Emilia, her mom and
her stepdad, Hawley. She sought out the vaccination because she was a medical
worker, a surgical technician for area plastic surgeons.
Kurill started exhibiting some of
the common side effects of the Moderna vaccine soon after getting her
second and final booster shot — fever, headache, nausea, chills. The side
effects lingered on then worsened, so three days later, Kurill went to the
Davis Hospital and Medical Center emergency room in Layton. Doctors there
determined she needed more specialized care and she was evacuated via
helicopter to Intermountain Medical Center in Murray. She died the next day,
Feb. 5.
“They said her liver had basically
shut down,” Hawley said.
An autopsy is being carried out,
Hawley said, which he hopes helps clarify the situation.
Perhaps this fairly young woman had some sort of
not-yet-diagnosed health issue. Or perhaps, in extremely rare cases, the
vaccines can trigger some sort of severe reaction within the vaccinated body
that presents a life-threatening risk.
More than 20 European countries have stopped using the
AstraZeneca vaccine this week, after about a dozen cases of vaccinated
individuals suffering from — and in some cases dying from — widespread blood
clots, low platelet counts, and internal bleeding. This detailed article in Science quotes a lot
of doctors and medical researchers and offers an intriguing theory about what
could be happening in these cases:
Madsen believes the unusual
symptoms may be the result of “a very strong immunological reaction.” Acute
infections can trigger clotting and bleeding, sometimes culminating in DIC,
Wendtner notes. But abnormal clotting is also a feature of COVID-19. It’s
possible, Wendtner says, that the unusual cases had a COVID-19 infection before
they got vaccinated; many were health care workers and teachers who may have
been exposed at work. Coming on top of the infection, the vaccine might somehow
have triggered an overreaction by the immune system, sparking the clotting
syndrome. Ganser thinks patients suffering from CVT may be the tip of the iceberg
and that more people may suffer similar, but milder, symptoms.
Back in February, the New York Times reported
on a few dozen vaccinated individuals showing signs of a “severe case of immune thrombocytopenia — a lack of platelets, a
blood component essential for clotting.”
It is not known whether this blood
disorder is related to the Covid vaccines. More than 31 million people in the United
States have received at least one dose, and 36 similar cases had been reported
to the government’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, VAERS, by the end
of January. The cases involved either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine,
the only two authorized so far for emergency use in the United States.
But the reporting system shows only
problems described by health care providers or patients after vaccination and
does not indicate whether the shots actually caused the problems.
Now, you can do math. Thirty-six cases out of 31 million
vaccinated people comes out to one in 861,111. Those CDC figures above about
the risk of anaphylaxis suggest your odds of experiencing it after getting a
COVID-19 vaccine ranges from one in 200,000 to one in 500,000. Earlier in the
week, I noted the CDC calculates your chances of being struck by lightning
as one in 500,000. (A reader pointed out that the risk varies a great deal
from individual to individual, depending upon how often they come in contact
with thunderstorms.) Your odds of being dealt a royal flush on the opening hand in a
poker game are one in 649,739. Your odds of dying from flesh-eating
bacteria are roughly 1 million to one.
To me, it’s a no-brainer. You’ve got a much higher risk
of serious health problems or death from COVID-19 than you do from the
vaccines. It’s not even close:
Paul Hunter, an infectious disease
expert at the University of East Anglia, noted in a statement that even if the risk
of CVT is raised by the vaccine to five or more cases per million people
vaccinated, the COVID-19 infection fatality rate for men in their mid-40s is
0.1%, or 1000 deaths per million infected.
But if you’ve got worries about the vaccines, or you’ve
had serious adverse reactions to a shot before, it’s probably worth talking to
your doctor. While there are not yet allergy tests designed to specifically
test for a reaction to a vaccine, the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and
Immunology notes that “the most common cause of adverse allergic immunologic events is
likely gelatin, although egg allergy might be a concern with yellow fever, measles/mumps/rubella,
varicella or live zoster vaccine. Risk with latex allergy is extremely low to
nonexistent as the amount of latex in syringes and multidose vials is very
low.”
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