Interesting word – it can have different meanings. At the moment people are talking about the risk of a blood clot following vaccination. I decided to look in to the numbers.
I found an interesting paper by NICE that suggests the risk of venous thromboembolism in the over 80s is 1 in 100 a year. There are over 2.5 million in this age group in the UK that have been vaccinated. That means we would expect 70 cases within a day of being vaccinated. There have been around this number of reports from both vaccines combined (and that covers a lot more than a day).
That is just the over 80s.
Looking at the yellow card reports this is the number of cases, not the number of deaths – the number of deaths as a result venous thromboembolism reported on the yellow card system is less than a tenth of this – less than 10.
Given that there are 20 million people vaccinated in the UK this would give a 1 in 2 million chance of death from venous thromboembolism following vaccination (that doesn’t mean they are caused by the vaccination – but to be on the really really worst case we can assume it is).
Okay – that would be 30 deaths from all of the UK being vaccinated.
Italy has stopped vaccination with AZ because they think ere may be a risk. They have 300 deaths a day. Every day they delay vaccination kills more than 300 people – because they are worried that there might possibly be a slight chance that 30 people will die.
To say this is a scientific decision is not accurate. It is a decision of a system that is designed for normal life – not pandemic life. And leaders that fail to recognise the need to change the system leads me to the other definition of clot.