Back of the envelope math on pausing AstraZeneca vaccinations

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European countries, led by Germany, have paused administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine. The US has not even begun to administer it yet.

There are 7 instances of blood clotting in 1.6M AstraZeneca shots in Germany. IF that’s causal ,which it looks like it isn’t, that means you have a .0004% chance of getting blood clotting if you get the AstraZeneca vaccine

Extremely conservatively, let’s say AstraZeneca reduces your chances of dying by 60%.  Currently 74K people  have died in Germany from COVID, out of a population of 80M. So getting the shot can reduce your chance of COVID death by 0.05%.

Given that we know COVID is killing people, and it looks like you’re 100 times more likely to die of COVID if you don’t get the vaccine than you are to get blood clotting if you do get the vaccine (which does not necessarily even kill you), it makes far more sense to err on the side of continuing (or beginning @USA) administration of the vaccine. By all means investigate the blood clots, but don’t stop administration of something we know will protect us from the virus until we get convincing evidence that halting vaccinations is safer than continuing them.