Im 35 with no other underlying health issues…
with everything in the news about the blood clots I can’t help thinking that if I’d not been diabetic I wouldn’t be offered the AZ jab.
Firstly, you are right you would not have been vaccinated yet if you were not diabetic. But you do have an underlying health condition, and that is diabetes. No matter how well you can control it, it is still there and will cause problems if you slip up. And no matter how small the increase in Covid risk because of it, there is still a higher risk. And that is why you were rightly vaccinated.
Secondly, as already said, the risk of clotting is very low, and from a second dose even lower still. The risk of Covid is high, and with the new variants constantly emerging it is getting higher.
But what you need to remember is that if we were not in a pandemic, the risk of clotting would have passed by without the public knowing or caring. The only reason it is news is because it lead to the deployment of the vaccine being suspended while it was investigated. Something that any other time would have still happened but without any media interest at all.
Look on any medication and you will see a list of side effects, organized into sections by how likely they are. The issue of clotting would have just been one of those, near the end of the list because of how rare it is. It is so rare that even if the vaccine had been tested in trials for longer it would most likely have never been discovered. It needed a large enough sample size, by being deployed in a population, or it to show up. The risk is that small.
And this something that could have happened with any vaccine or medication you take — at any time, rare side effects can be discovered long after something is approved for use — but such events are normally not seen outside of medical journals.
The problem is that the general media does not know how to cover specialist medical stories, and the general public does not know how to understand them. And this then leads to fear. Because it is presented as something scary, and people are not used to such stories that it makes this vaccine seem more dangerous because you have not heard such stories about anything else.
The Covid virus is still far more dangerous and scary than the vaccine. But it is easy to think you might be lucky and not catch it, and it has become normalized after over a year of restrictions that people have become numb to it and its effects. Far more people in the U.K. died in one year from Covid than civilians died here during the six years of World World II. Yet Covid is not talked about in the same terms as the Blitz.
People think if they take the vaccine there is a risk clotting, so it is a real risk.
People think they can be careful so they can avoid Covid, so it is a theoretical risk.
That is wrong, both are real risks, but the chance of suffering effects of Covid are much greater than clotting from the vaccine. And that is before considering that the benefits of not getting Covid only helps one person, the benefits of being vaccinated help everyone they meet. And at its most superficial, the vaccine allows society to open so they can go back to living their lives as they used to, not taking it means restrictions will continue indefinitely.
However, the mosts important thing about the discovery of clotting is that it means doctors now know to watch out for it and how to treat this particular form. So its discovery is good news. It makes the vaccine safer, because now people know to contact their doctor if they experience symptoms, and their doctor knows what to do to prevent it being fatal.
May seem a silly question but what would you do?
You are more likely to die of Covid than you are of clotting.
You may kill other people as a carrier of Covid but will not kill anyone simply by being vaccinated.
I would take the vaccine.
