James Doogue

I came across the meme below and frankly found the numbers surprising. I decided to Fact-Check them as Facebook hadn't bothered. I'm not interested in the Pill or Smokers, just comparing getting the risk of getting a blood clot from the Azstrazenaca vaccine versus the risk of getting a blood clot from Covid-19.

I've just had the AZ jab, so I'm not an anti-vaxer, but this is a great example of how data can be manipulated to show almost anything, and even just completely made up!

The latest research shows that the number of blood clots resulting from the AZ jab to be 6 blood clot cases per million. Admittedly not a big difference to 4 per million figure in this meme.

But the number of 165,000 per million blood clot cases for those who contract Covid-19 seems very much higher than I can find in the literature, which is just 39 per million.

See: https:// www1.racgp.org.a u/newsgp/ clinical/ blood-clots-up-t o-10-times-more -common-with-co vid

However, comparing the two numbers, is a false dichotomy any way.

Not everyone will contract Covid-19 if left to run its course, just like back in 1917/18 not everyone in the world caught the Spanish flu. Some people have a natural immunity, others simply have a strong immune system.

Currently in the world today, the country with the highest rate of infection is Czechia at 15.4% last time I looked.

We can apply that rate to Australia's population. I know the countries aren't comparable, but this is just a mathematical exercise. So a worst case scenario might be that 15.4% of 25,500,000 people in Australia get Covid-19. That's 3,927,000. If 39 per million get blood clots, that's 3.927 × 39 = 153.15 people getting a blood clot because of Covid-19.

On the other hand, if we have the entire population vaccinated with AZ, that's 25.5 X 6 cases per million which equals remarkably, 153 people getting blood clots from the vaccine.

So apart from the dodgy statistics in the meme, the logic error is to assume that if you don't get vaccinated, you will definitely get Covid-19.

In fact with the AZ vaccine the risk of a blood clot is line ball with not getting vaccinated, if Australia had an infection rate as high as that in Czechia.

Incidentally I had a terrible adverse reaction from AZ which lasted about 36 hours. Every joint and muscle ached, I had a splitting headache, and a temperature of 38.8°C. And I had some pretty strong pain killers and still felt terrible.

Some 52.4% of people have reported adverse reactions to the AZ vaccine.

PS:
1. The 16.5% of Covid-19 cases having blood clots is obviously dodgy because only about 5% - 10% of cases globally receive hospitalisation treatment for Covid-19.

2. Yes it's possible the infection rate in Czechia could rise, but it's also likely Australia's infection rate would be nothing close to Czechia's.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:52 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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