Professor Kalibat: Who benefits from the AstraZeneca vaccine hysteria?

Sure, we can blame antivirals, illiteracy, or some people’s principled attitude against vaccines, vaccine supply disruptions, and the like, but we have to admit that some of the blame falls on the shoulders of the people as well. politicians. Lithuania, which has consistently declared its full confidence in the AstraZeneca vaccine and will continue to vaccinate with this vaccine, and the termination of this process will be detrimental in every way, suddenly declares that the vaccination will be stopped.

The decision appears to have been made by mimicking the political and rather populist decisions of some European countries, in an effort to ensure that a certain proportion of the population expresses distrust of the vaccine in the upcoming elections and a further increase in their political ratings. . Unfortunately, the virus of distrust towards the vaccine, based on unscientific doubts or even imaginary evidence that it can cause thromboembolic processes in the human body, has started to spread in some European countries much faster than the British strain of coronavirus. The statistics provided by the researchers did not help, with only 37 confirmed cases of thromboembolism reported after 17 million doses of the vaccine, which certainly does not beat the statistical results in the group of people who have not been vaccinated.

The UK Health and Medicines Agency and World Health Organization guarantees that AstraZeneca is safe and that there is no scientific evidence that it causes thromboembolic processes have also failed. After all, 11 million doses of this vaccine have been injected in Britain alone and no direct deaths from the vaccine have been reported.

No one seems to have been interested in or conducted full clinical trials in vaccinated people that have shown that after vaccination, the usual reactions to the vaccine, such as pain and swelling at the injection site, headache, muscle pain, joint pain, fever and chills, occasionally nausea, fatigue, the sensation goes away within a few days and, unlike American vaccines, all side effects are much less common or less pronounced after the second dose.

Unfortunately, the gin has already been taken out of the bottle carelessly (and perhaps on purpose), the AstraZeneca vaccine has been completely compromised, and European countries are stopping vaccinations one after another. Who is to blame for this now would seem unequivocally difficult to answer.

Perhaps the European Medicines Agency, which delayed registration of the vaccine, and perhaps miscommunication, can be blamed for the fact that the vaccine is only suitable for people under 65, followed by sudden new guarantees about the effectiveness of the vaccine in all age groups and early.

There were also opinions that our large neighbor may have been an active contributor to the discrediting of the AstraZeneca vaccine. After all, the Russian vaccine was approved without passing the third stage of clinical trials. At Novosibirsk’s second-largest vaccine production center, clinical trials were limited to 38 volunteers, which, according to some honest Russian academics, was described not only as a discredit of science but also as a crime, such as clinical trials. with hundreds of thousands.

Personally, I have no opinion on this vaccine, but Vladimir Putin has guaranteed that the Russian vaccine will provide immune protection against the coronavirus for up to two years. Of course, there are miracles, especially in Russia, because modern COVID-19 vaccines, currently developed by pharmaceutical companies in the Western world, guarantee immune protection for only 6-8 months, based on the limited data available.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the AstraZeneca vaccine, the mood in Lithuania is not much better than in other European countries. Family physicians have really gone to great lengths to campaign for the importance of vaccination and try to convince all their patients that not only Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna, but also AstraZeneca is equally effective and reliable, so the vaccination is safe.

Now that vaccination with AstraZeneca has been stopped, trust not only in GPs, but also in scientific facts appears to be undermined. By the way, researchers across Europe are still trying to persuade politicians not to stop the vaccination process.

In a democracy, everyone has the right to express their opinion. For example, the “vaccine experts” at Visaginas and Šalčininkai expressed their strong opinion that they would not be vaccinated with the unreliable AstraZeneca vaccine, but only with the Russian one. I really don’t want to believe that this influenced our politicians’ decision to stop vaccination with AstraZeneca in Lithuania.

Of course, the current situation is complicated by the fact that part of the population has already received the first dose of the vaccine. And what’s next?

You really wouldn’t want politicians to create rules for treatment or vaccination. He was already in Lithuania, and it ended up very sad for the former minister. Clearly, everyone has every right to decide on vaccines.

Unfortunately, people around the world die and will die from various diseases and, of course, from thromboembolic complications, but the direct link between vaccination and thromboembolic complications has not been established. But science has conclusively shown that the coronavirus itself often causes vascular thromboembolism. Therefore, protection against coronavirus is essential to protect against thromboembolism.

For any vaccine, serious complications after vaccination are very rare. The coronavirus itself is much more dangerous. After all, an older person has a real chance of dying from a coronavirus infection by up to 20 percent. The risk of developing serious complications after vaccination is 1: 50,000 or less.

Do you need more comments? Of course, everyone has complete freedom to decide for themselves about the vaccine, but they want that decision to be made on the basis of science-based facts, not emotions.