Once again, yesterday, I woke to Big Brother (aka the BBC) telling me what it wanted me to hear and what the government thinks we ought to hear. The news was that the risk of succumbing to a blood clot is much higher if you become infected with COVID-19 than the risk of the same from taking a COVID-19 vaccine. This was echoed in a wide range of other outlets. The BBC has long been trying to reassure us about the safety of COVID-19 vaccines. I may have missed it, but I did not hear a report on the same programme about the confirmed death from a COVID-19 vaccine related complication of Liz Shaw, one of their own presenters. That must have been inconvenient for them. I don’t doubt the figures that demonstrate the relative safety of the vaccines versus the infection. But the logic of presenting this as positive news in entirely flawed and here is why. It is clearly a case of facts being used as propaganda by not providing a full explanation of what they mean.
The risk of a blood clot from COVID-19 infection is low, but higher than the risk from a vaccine. Specifically, quoting from the report in The Guardian: “…the data showed that there would be 934 extra cases of thrombocytopenia for every 10 million people after infection, compared with 107 after the first shot of the AstraZeneca jab. For ischaemic strokes, there would be an estimated 1,699 extra cases for every 10 million people after infection, while there would be only 143 extra cases after the first Pfizer jab.” So far, so good. But the overall risk of catching COVID-19, using recent UK government figures is only approximately 8%. That risk is higher for older people and falls significantly with age to virtually negligible in younger people. Therefore, the actual percentage of people at a population level who may succumb to a clot as a result of COVID-19 infection is miniscule.
On the other hand, the government is on a mission to vaccinate the whole population. Currently, vastly more people have been vaccinated than have caught COVID-19. Let’s assume the government hunts us down, pins us down and jabs us all. Then the risk—albeit small—of developing a clot applies to absolutely everyone in the population. Of course, the risk is not equally distributed and, ironically, applies more to younger than to older people. So, as your risk of contracting COVID-19 decreases, your risk of a clot from a COVID-19 vaccine increases. Presumably there is an age when these two risks cross over and the risk of a complication from the vaccine is precisely the same as from infection. We ought to be told. To add insult to the risk of vaccination injury, the vaccines are remarkably ineffective at reducing individual risk of contracting COVID-19. I am not anti-vaccination. I am not even anti-COVID vaccinations. But I am anti-bullshit.
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