Fear is free

A nurse prepares a dose of the Astrazeneca vaccine in Dublin, Ireland. CLODAGH KILCOYNE / Reuters

• EMA Finds "Possible Links" Between Very Rare Cases of Thrombi and AstraZeneca's Vaccine

There was great expectation yesterday, Wednesday, to know the conclusions of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) on the AstraZeneca vaccine.

That alone, regardless of the content of the report, is in itself a novelty.

The majority of the European population had never been so aware of a scientific body that they all fund, but of which few had the slightest news.

None of this is an invention of the media.

The reader is likely to know people in your circle who are genuinely concerned about whether they get AstraZeneca over Pfizer or Moderna.

They know that reason tells them to prick it, but also that their stomach pushes them in the opposite direction.

Well, the EMA has already ruled on AstraZeneca.

This is the fifth time he has done it.

The main novelty compared to previous reports is that the EMA recognizes “possible links” between this vaccine and the rare thrombi that have been detected in the population injected with it.

Not that that's saying much, but it will be enough for the AstraZeneca insert to list blood clots as "very rare side effects."

And they are rare indeed: one thrombus per 100,000 vaccinated, or 0.001%, when the lethality of the virus is around 1%, or a thousand times more.

But those are arguments for reason, not for the stomach.

Many people will stay with the "possible links", or even with "links", to dry, and will not read that line.

This is what happens with movie posters, which put "unrepeatable" where the critic had said "unrepeatable boredom."

We live in times of short messages and doctrines of little sense and a lot of decibel.

It is not the most permeable environment to reason that can be imagined, but, in short, it is the human material that we have.

If it comes to giving a short message, none better than this: get vaccinated.

We will begin to hear again the murga that scientists change their minds every Wednesday, which makes them unreliable in the eyes of many citizens.

But scientists do not change their minds, they receive new data that they must continually interpret and update.

The EMA has never recommended stopping vaccination with AstraZeneca and continues to not do so.

Those who have changed their minds are a few European governments and Spanish autonomous communities, such as Castilla y León, which invented the other day an ingenious new formulation of the helpful and misnamed precautionary principle.

Does the Castilian-Leon Health Minister really believe that he is smarter than all the scientific talent that the EMA represents?

Hopefully you will restart your AstraZeneca vaccination now, as you should never have stopped.

The AstraZeneca question looks more and more like one of those thought experiments proposed to us by moral philosophers and psychologists.

You go downhill with your van, your brakes break and your only two options are to run over a child or 20 old men who have just got off the Imserso bus.

With just a second to choose from, what do you do?

Apply it to the vaccine: do you save one or a thousand?