My husband has a vaccine appointment! He is firmly in the “everyone” category and neither of us had the bandwidth to do the vaccine hunter thing. BUT you do not have to be a Kaiser member to use their waitlist, so that’s what he did. He was number 21K and change on Friday, and yesterday he got word to make an appointment… for tomorrow!
So… that was a lot easier than I thought it would be and surprisingly efficient for getting stuck so early. We are going on a plane trip for a memorial (outdoor, and almost all the adult attendees are fully vaxxed) so I am really glad he will have at least a smidge of developing protection.
The two vaccines available in Australia are AstraZeneca and Pfizer. Very limited quantities of Pfizer and we have a manufacturing capability for AstraZeneca although just ramping up.
Last week, due to very, very rare but also very serious cases of a specific blood clotting condition that has been occurring in other countries (and as of yesterday there are 2 cases in Australia), the government has recommended Astrazenaca be limited to over 50s. (Similar to measures taken in other countries)
The government said they weighed up:
The clotting condition risk seems to be in the under 50 age group and women
The risk of severe disease from COVID is much higher in the over 50s population.
Australia has no local transmission at the moment so not in a desperate rush to vaccinate the population.
They’ve also said the stance may change if there is an outbreak here.
I’m partly mentioning this because AstraZeneca is based on the same platform as Johnson and Johnson (adenoidal vector) and there is speculation that the issues may be related.
Not surprisingly the AstraZeneca situation is causing much angst here in all age groups and it will slow down vaccination because our supply of Pfizer is very limited. I’m over 50 and my preference would be for Pfizer because it seems to be more effective against variants but I’ll take whatever I’m offered - the more people that are vaccinated the better! That said I’m hoping to get Pfizer later on as a follow-up.
I saw 1 in 1000 for birth control, in a reputable newspaper. And that flights over 8h are similar risk to astrazeneca. We still are dealing with people who don’t want to take the AZ risk but want to hop on an 8 hour flight
I got a clot from a BC that ended up with a big class action lawsuit because of that issue. Luckily it was just a peripheral venous clot and not any sort of DVT. Not just because of the direct risk factors there, but because DVT would have excluded me from IVF. Incredibly high rates of blood clots as a result of IVF. Which makes sense when you think about the hormone levels.
I started on birth control back in college. I remember them telling me about blood clots and other side effects, but even as a science student who read the whole drug insert, I definitely didn’t realize the risks were quite so high.
I mean, I still would have taken it, because 1:1000 or 1:3000 chance of blood clots seems less scary than conservative religious parents + an unplanned pregnancy at 20.
I think it just shows our society’s misogyny that all the side effects of birth control are just accepted as is, and there isn’t much done to try to develop oral contraceptives without them. Birth control just lets women have sex without consequences. There should be consequences for having sex.
In Covid vaccine news- my arm is SO sore I barely slept (I sleep on my non-dominate side), and my headache is insane. I am also very tired, and my stomach is upset. However, on a typical day, I have a headache, digestion issues, and am very tired, so it is difficult to blame anything except the sore arm, on the vaccine.
Well pregnancy, obviously. Or blood clots if you are avoiding pregnancy.
/That was sarcasm. I do not think sex should have consequences, but the number of times I’ve seen “she should just keep her legs together if she didn’t want {whatever} to happen” leads me to believe a large section of our society does think this.
When a birth control for men was in development, trials stopped due to side effects. The journal articles I saw at the time showed those side effects were generally LESS than what women have on contraceptives. But in men, they were bad.
And if we weren’t so obsessed with baseball, we could use injectable contraception that has far fewer sides.
But I agree no one seems to care what women go through, including female medical practicioners. The amount of money we’ve had to spend to even get someone to listen to my wife’s symptoms is insane.
I do think that there’s a huge problem that we are evaluating birth control methods as risk versus reward for the individual, not the dyad. So for women, the risks of birth control is less than the risk seen in pregnancy. Therefore, it’s an acceptable medication under bio ethics. But for men, since they’re not the ones that experience pregnancy, that side effect profile is considered unacceptable because the alternative risk factor for that individual is less than the medication. but like, for mom and baby medicine, we look at their risk factors as a dyad. So why can’t we look at the risk factors of a reproductively aged couple is a dyad?
So I was looking at a Medscape article, and I do think it’s worth noting though that the type of blood clots here matter. I don’t think that these are singular blood clots, like pulmonary emboli or deep vein thrombosis. Which are definitely risky themselves, but these are even more risky, because this is a ton of diffuse a little blood clots everywhere, coupled with thrombocytopenia because all the platelets have been used in aggregating into those clots. So basically, you have clots throughout the body but then you also functionally have a bleeding disorder everywhere else, so your capillaries leak blood components into the “third space”. It’s really hard to treat and pretty dangerous, especially as compared to “normal” clots.
Although obviously the absolute risk of this is extremely low, and it appears to be affecting just one patient subtype. I do think educating providers on being able to identify and treat it that was a good idea, but the pause is definitely an interesting decision. Pros and cons to that.
The mass vaccine site I volunteer at was super slow today. My station(one of eight) saw about 15 people in the 2 hours I was there.
I worry that this means we are starting to reach the point where those who want to be vaccinated have been and now there’s just the rest of the population who refuses.
I worry that this means we are starting to reach the point where those who want to be vaccinated have been and now there’s just the rest of the population who refuses.
There are lots of reports that surmise this is the case.
The pandemic is never going to end. Masks are the new t-shirts. And since there is still uncontrolled spread, our vaccines will probably be rendered useless due to mutations anyway.
I am really pessimistic this, but don’t feel like there is much reason not to be.
I think that there’s still hope. A lot of people aren’t eligible yet, at least in my state, until next week. We’re averaging close to an additional 1% of the population with at least one dose per day.
This terrifies me too. I don’t know if the vaccines will be useless, but I feel like they will be more imperfect. A friend just posted a story today about a woman who was fully vaxxed, still masked and not going anywhere indoors and wiping down groceries (which, uh, I was really looking forward to no longer wiping down my groceries once the 2nd shot kicks in) and STILL got covid.
The other day we were watching an episode of The Flash where the Flash runs around injecting… I forget what, metahuman cure? into a whole bunch of people at lightning speed, jab jab jab jab. And I turned to Boyfriend and said THAT is what needs to happen, we need the Flash to run around shooting vaccine into people’s arms before they know what happened to them!
Sigh. Yes I know, consent, bodily autonomy, etc. Details, details.
Just make sure you’re not getting too mucked down by negativity bias and the extremely extremely rare cases though. People still die of bubonic plague too, that doesn’t mean that I’m going around so flagellating to try to avoid it like it’s the middle ages. or, more to the point, a couple hundred kids every couple years end up paralyzed with a polio relative. Does that mean I’m never going to take my kid to a playground? Absolutely not. At some point, we have to assume some level of risk.
What paperwork is required for the 16-18 year olds? Like if I bring my almost six year old by in a trench coat and the paperwork were “smudgey” … Or maybe I borrow the neighbor’s kid and we go full Little Rascles and they go through twice with a different kid on top each time.
or, more to the point, a couple hundred kids every couple years end up paralyzed with a polio relative. Does that mean I’m never going to take my kid to a playground? Absolutely not. At some point, we have to assume some level of risk.