After UK authorities recommended under-30s should be offered alternatives, we break down the risks associated with the Oxford jab 

9 Apr 2021 | Full Fact's weekly news
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FACT CHECK
What you need to know about the AstraZeneca vaccine

On Wednesday, the government’s joint committee on vaccines and immunisation (JCVI) announced its recommendation that under-30s should be offered an alternative to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine.

Amid heightened confusion, Full Fact has broken down some of the key facts behind the announcements:
* In the period up until 31 March, 20.2 million doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine had been administered in the UK
* The UK’s drugs regulator found that 79 have suffered this specific type of blood clot
* The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) says this was equivalent to an overall risk of 1 in 250,000

To put this into context, we can compare this risk to the risks of becoming ill with Covid.

The Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University has calculated the potential harms of getting this type of blood clot after the vaccine, compared with the benefits of being vaccinated.

It found that the immediate potential for harm of the vaccine for those aged 20-29 slightly outweighs the benefits.

Vaccinating 100,000 people of that age will avoid about 0.8 intensive care admissions due to Covid-19 in a 16-week period.

However, for the same age group, the Winton Centre estimated that about 1.1 in 100,000 would suffer blood clots. But both risks are extremely small.

It’s right and reasonable that people have questions about the safety of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine. The evidence suggests the associated risks are small.

But it is important that people have access to the available evidence—and that this information is put into context—so that they can make informed decisions.
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Twitter poll results don’t show ‘wide support’ for Thailand’s travel policy ([link removed])

An article on the subject in the Independent neatly encapsulates almost everything that is bad about doing polls on social media.

The piece claimed that most people are in favour of Thailand’s plans to open up to vaccinated travellers from 1 July, citing as evidence the results of a “Twitter poll conducted for The Independent”. This was the author of the article’s own Twitter poll.

Making this claim is inaccurate reporting of the results in the first place, since the question was about whether older holidaymakers would leave younger travellers behind, not whether or not they were in favour of Thailand’s travel policy in general.

Social media polls can also never be said to actually represent a wider population, because you never really know who is answering a social media poll.

Good surveys ask neutral non-leading questions to get a fair read on public opinion. In this case, the poll framed the question almost as a matter of intergenerational inequality.
Why you should never use polls like this ([link removed])
Fake Daily Mirror article about “Dragons Den oil investors” appears to be a scam ([link removed])

This week, we spotted a widely-shared online article, which has been designed to look almost exactly like an online article from the Daily Mirror.

It claimed that the government has censored an episode of Dragons’ Den which featured an oil investment scheme, through which it said members of the public could “easily earn £7,380.10 from home… per day”.

This is a fake article, and Full Fact has found no evidence that the trading platform, known as “Oil Profit” has ever existed as a registered business in the UK.
What are the telltale signs of a fake article? ([link removed])
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