Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service, with a programme that loves

to be at the sharp end of statistics and I'm Tim Haferd.

The AstraZeneca COVID-19 jab remains in the headlines because some regulators have concluded

that it may raise the risk of a very rare type of blood clot, albeit to a risk that is still

very low. In the past few weeks, a number of countries have said they will limit its use

to older age groups, who stand the most to gain from being vaccinated as quickly as possible.

The risks are so low that it's hard to be sure they even exist at all.

They may just be adverse events that happen not long after vaccination.

If you vaccinate millions of people, well millions of people is a lot and some of them will

get pregnant when they don't want to be, others will die in car accidents. That doesn't mean the

vaccine causes car accidents or unwanted pregnancies, but the risks may well be real. So how big might

they be? The BBC's Head of Data, Robert Cough, explained that if one million imaginary people were

given the AstraZeneca vaccine, we might expect four to develop these rare clots and one to die as a

result. That's based on recent figures published by the UK medicines regulator. So a one in a million

chance of death. If you're in the UK, that's roughly the same risk as being murdered in the next

month, or if you get in a car and drive for 250 miles, the risk of you dying in a road accident

on that journey. But there's another type of comparison that's caught our reporter Charlotte

McDonald's attention, and that is the contraceptive pill, a medication with a well-documented

link to increased risk of clotting. Hello Charlotte. Hi Tim, so yes, people have emailed us and people

have been talking about this online. Here's a selection of comments I've seen in response to the

concerns that the AstraZeneca jab might cause a small number of cases of a rare clot. I've had a

blood clot caused by medication that women are prescribed every single day without a care in the

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