Thread by @maggiekb1

Here’s my hot take: this isn’t about the blood clots. But it’s also not bonkers. It’s about the bigger picture on AstraZeneca and a sense of “bad news” that’s formed around it ...

https://twitter.com/paleofuture/status/1371739158125768707

AstraZeneca, if you don't recall, has ... had some shit happening. It's clinical trials were paused for safety concerns last fall nytimes.com/2020/09/19/hea…

Which maybe wouldn't be a big red flag to me except that then it turned out they'd been administering doses wrong and tracking and disclosing their data poorly. nytimes.com/2020/11/25/bus…

And then later, South Africa just stopped using AstraZeneca because it was clearly just straight up not working against the variant of COVID-19 common in that country. sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/s…

Now the blood clot risk: This really does seem to be an artifact of random chance at this point. We're talking about 37 cases out of 5 million+ people -- which is actually fewer cases than you'd just expect to find in 5 million people at random.

(Also, like, even if the AstraZeneca DID cause those 37 cases of blood clots thats is a MUCH lower risk than birth control -- and we actually have a causal mechanism for the birth control. So.)

But, I think it's clear that people are making these choices about pausing use AstraZeneca because of that vaccine's history of other issues and untrustworthiness, more than on the blood clot data.

As the meme goes, "the Iranian yogurt is not the issue here."

The clots are just, like, a peg on which to hang a hat of generalized discomfort and man that is a really messy analogy but you get the point.

Realistically, I don't know that I'd choose AstraZeneca. Not because I'm worried about clots. Because of the SA variant thing.

Anyway, all of this extra sucks because AstraZeneca was also the one that had been set up as "the vaccine nonprofits will buy for developing countries". theguardian.com/global-develop…