Vaccine fiasco.

[sparky Paul]

Nothing contradictory at all, certain EU members are going it alone in banning the AZ and spreading malicious fake news about it.

This is my point. "Certain EU members" is not the same as "the EU", and many commentators freely interchange the two to please whatever agenda they have. The EMA has been asked by "certain" EU member states to look at the safely of the AZ vaccine, and they have done, and concluded that it is safe.

We know it's as safe as any vaccine can be, and that the vanishingly tiny risks are massively outweighed by the protection against it gives us against the virus. You don't have to convince us of that.

I have seen very little criticism of the Pfizer and other mRNA vaccines - mainly because a German company ( BionTech ) is involved in one of them.

You think that there is more criticism of the AstraZeneca vaccine because it's an Anglo-Swedish company?

[JimSh]

Quote from radio 4 via Guardian
"‘More work needs to be done’ to investigate rare blood clots among people who received AstraZeneca jab

Evidence is growing that the occurrence of a number of rare blood clot events among people who have had the AstraZeneca coronavirus vaccine is “causally related”, a scientist has said.

The Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) said on Thursday that it had identified 30 cases of rare blood clot events among people in the UK who had received the AstraZeneca jab, following similar reports from Germany.

Professor Paul Hunter, a medical microbiologist at the University of East Anglia, told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme: “It is not uncommon to get clusters of rare events purely by chance.

“But, once you find that cluster in one population and it then crops up in another - such as previously in the German and now in the English - then I think the chances of that being a random association is very, very low.

“Clearly more work needs to be done, but I think the evidence is shifting more towards it being causally related at the moment.”

However he said that the risks of taking the AstraZenca vaccine were still far outweighed by the risks of not getting the jab.

“The chance of dying if you don’t have the vaccine is many times greater than the risk of dying from CVT (cerebral venous thrombosis) after the AstraZeneca vaccine, even if it does turn out, as I suspect it will, that this link is causal,” he said. "

[ColinB]

Pity R4 & The Guardian chose to run that story in that way to emphasise that there may be a causal link, because that’s the bit that’ll stick in people’s minds and result in vaccine hesitancy.

Why didn’t they lead with something like ...
“Whether or not there is a causal link is completely irrelevant, because the incidence of blood clots is so tiny that the chance of dying if you don’t have the AstraZeneca vaccine is many times greater than the risk of dying from CVT (cerebral venous thrombosis) if you do have it.”
... That’s the most important thing here, yet it’s tucked away at the end of the story, which many people won’t bother with, rather than being the first thing you read.

[sparky Paul]

... That’s the most important thing here, yet it’s tucked away at the end of the story, which many people won’t bother with, rather than being the first thing you read.

To be fair, that's a transcript from Radio 4, so it could be argued that the last thing discussed might be the thing that listeners will take away from it.

The Guardian article buries this quote from Paul Hunter well into the text, and leads first with the MHRA stressing that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risk, and that there is no proven causal link as yet.

[JimSh]

I took the extract from the rolling news in the Guardian.
As Paul says the balance between the risks involved better explained in the fuller article.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/apr/02/covid-further-rare-blood-clot-cases-found-in-oxford-astrazeneca-recipients

However that was yesterday's paper and the Radio 4 item and this and similar links are from today.

https://www.warringtonguardian.co.uk/news/national/19208547.expert-suspects-causal-link-astrazeneca-jab-rare-blood-clots/

[Kremmen]

From what I've been reading the majority of these cases are young women who are on the contraceptive pill.

Given that the pill also lists blood clots as a possible side effect .......

Coincidence ?

https://www.scotsman.com/read-this/the-contraceptive-pill-is-more-likely-to-cause-blood-clots-than-the-astrazeneca-covid-vaccine-what-you-need-to-know-3169411?itm_source=parsely-api

[embee]

...... certain EU members are going it alone in banning the AZ (vaccine)* ........

I think this is where the contention exists.
Certain countries have taken independent decisions and actions regarding their own national health functioning, whether they are EU member states or not (some are not) is irrelevant, it isn't necessary to refer to everything as being related to the "EU" when it is not an EU matter.
I'm not aware that any country has "banned" the AZ vaccine. Even if they did, it would be their own prerogative. There have been pauses or suspensions, and some restrictions in application, but has any country banned it?

* I added the word vaccine to the original truncated quote purely for clarity.