It’s the start of a grim week. It’s been 1 year since the first SARS-Cov-2 was officially diagnosed in the US. The reality is that it was here many weeks before, we just didn’t know it. We have surpassed 400,000 deaths and almost 25 million cases. LA county alone has surpassed 1 million cases and someone dies there every 8 minutes.
Yet there are still people who think it’s a mild flu, a hoax, and most selfishly, an infringement on our civil liberties to wear a mask!! WTF????? We will never learn.
Anyway,
There is a lot of chatter and misinformation on the web about some of the potential dangers about the Covid vaccine. The most recent one has to do with a number of deaths in Norway apparently associated with the Pfizer vaccine. I say “apparently” because it is still very early in the investigative process but people, especially naysayers, love to jump on anything that promotes their cause. A number of news sources have written articles about 29 deaths in Norwegian nursing home patients after they were vaccinated with the Pfizer vaccine. All the patients were described as “elderly and frail” and the ages were 75 and above. There were very few specifics of their deaths and I was not able to find any information on some of the reliable sources I look to.
The simple answer at this stage is that it is early and we need much more information before drawing any conclusions. It is interesting that only Norway has had such numbers. It is interesting that all the news sources I looked at had exactly the same information, probably meaning that they were just regurgitating the same information from the same source. Time will tell.
As an example of how time and proper information clears and settles the initial panic, I would point to a Covid outbreak in a NY state nursing home which was initially blamed on the vaccines. When the real information actually came out, the infection leading to the outbreak began 2 days before the vaccines were given. Since it takes a minimum of 3 days to manifest symptoms and 2-3 weeks to get maximum protection, and it was the first dose, there can be no possible relationship. In addition, given how these vaccines are manufactured, it is impossible to get Covid-19 from the vaccine.
Another overblown story came from the British trials when it was reported that 6 people died during late-stage trials. These claims are also partly false. 6 people did die during the Pfizer vaccine trials, but only 2 of them were given the vaccine. The other 4 were given the placebo, which is essentially saline. As far as the patients who did die after the real vaccine, one had known heart disease and died of a heart attack many weeks after the vaccine and the other, a few days after the vaccine was given and his death was also attributed to atherosclerotic heart disease, the #1 cause of death in the US and Britain. No causal relationship was established between the vaccine and the two deaths, which occurred in line with the normal death rate for the general population.
Getting back to Norway, much more data is needed. What we know is that 45,000 doses have been given in Norway and the 29 deaths were all nursing home residents. If you just look at the numbers and make the assumption that the vaccine is responsible, that’s a 0.07% death rate overall. I don’t have the demographic breakdown of the numbers in Norway and I was also not able to find any information about death after vaccination in the US. Maybe that’s because there have been no deaths, or we just have not heard about them yet but the way news flys around the web, even the conspiracy theorists should have dug something up by now. I certainly have not heard of any in our region.
When compared to US numbers, which we know, there have been over 400,000 deaths with 24 million cases so far, with an overall death rate of ~1.65%. That is 23x higher than the 0.07% in Norway from the vaccine. If you look at US deaths in people 75 years and older, the most recent data I could find showed that there were ~ 176,000 deaths and 1.13 million chases, with a percentage of 14%. That is 233x higher!
I may not have all the most recent data, and we are comparing 2 different things, but the bottom line is that, even if you take the Norwegians numbers at face value, the chances of dying from Covid-19 are far greater than they are from the vaccine if you are over 75. If you are any age!
We clearly need to know more but my advice is that, when your number is up, get the vaccine, regardless of age or chronic disease status. YES, there are exceptions and you should discuss this with your doctor, but the vast majority of people should be getting it. My 97 year old grandmother in Toronto just got her first dose last week and is doing well. I’m all for it.
We can’t lament this damn pandemic and its impact on our way of life but not be willing to do what is necessary to get past it, and vaccination is crucial to achieve that goal. Success can’t be achieved without all the other important things like wearing a mask, distancing and hand washing and getting healthy.
It’s a grim week, but there is always hope and when humans work together, amazing things happen. So to start the week, let’s repeat the Elf’s Code… I mean the compassionate, caring human’s code:
- Wear a MASK. Wear a good one, properly covering your nose. Stop touching it.
- DISTANCE.
- WASH your hands. Use sanitizer when you must.
- VENTILATE.
- VACCINATE.
- PROTECT YOUR EYES.
- HYDRATE.
- GET HEALTHY.
Stay safe and be well.
AC