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When the german government announced that they would stop administering AstraZeneca because of potentially deadly side effects, I was wondering what kind of risk calculation would be happening in the background.

I made a quick, probably oversimplified calculation like this:

Assuming that the real (i.e no assumed) risk of dying from vaccination would be 1 in 200.000, if 5% of people who would not get vaccinated would get infected with Covid, 1% of which would die, then that would still be a hundred times more people dying from Covid than from vaccination side effects, i.e. 200.000 * 0.05 * 0.01 = 100.

Looking at this result, I would say that pausing/stopping vaccinations was completely off the table. Is this calculation simplified too much? What does the actual calculation look like?

Thomas Hirsch
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  • I don't know what they calculated, but surely it's more complicated than what you state. If indeed one vaccine would be clearly worse than others in terms of side effects, the alternative to look at is not "no vaccination" but rather "using a potentially better one a little bit later". And then one needs to look at all characteristics, not only side effects, of the considered alternatives, only for the time the vaccine is stopped (which is unknown at the point when it's stopped but will depend on information collected in the meantime). – Christian Hennig Mar 19 '21 at 11:35
  • Another issue is that if there is a suspicion that a vaccine might cause deaths, even with a probability so low that it's still much lower than the probability to die from Covid in a week or so, this mey deter some people from getting vaccinated and therefore undermine the campaign. Chances are they build some more trust saying we stop for some time and investigate further, which overall could convince more people to get vaccinated, and in turn save lifes. Even if in reality there's no problem with the vaccine. – Christian Hennig Mar 19 '21 at 13:06
  • @Lewian Thank you for the comments, I can follow your line of thinking. I am starting to think probably this has very little to do with statistics after all... – Thomas Hirsch Mar 20 '21 at 00:27

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