Probability is a funny only thing.

We can become as despondent about our vanishing chances of winning the lottery as we might become paranoid about being afflicted by a rare illness, and both at about the same percentages.

Current odds of a fatal blood clot after being spritzed with the AZ vaccine are approximately 1 in 1,000,000. That is the same as experiencing death after driving 250 miles and as half as likely as being struck by lightning.

I can’t see too many folk getting bent out of shape by the latter two.

Similarly, we can be reassured by the unfeasible long shot of being struck by fire bolt from the sky or become fixated about ending up being the 1.

Our mental health will likely decide which way the hysteria tilts the fragile psyche, and as is the norm, social media cockwombledom has kicked into overdrive and into the teeth of a world clambering back to its feet.

Of course, in the world of probable reckoning somebody always has to be the 1, but if we worry too much about it, it might as well go and happen anyway. By that point, we’re already bidding adios to our quality of life as it skids down the streaked porcelain.

Spare a thought, though, for the guy who invented heparin, the anticoagulant drug with whose history this latest AZ clotting chaos is being compared.

Aside from strong links to chills, fever, and hives, users also endure asthma, rhinitis, lacrimation, headaches, nausea and vomiting – plus a bit of Itching, burning, and bursting into floods of tears, it remains the anti-clotting agent of choice.

Even considering that it was also linked to, you’ve guessed it, blood clots.

You can imagine that news-nugget once left tolerance levels wearing as thin as the blood it was employed to treat should have been. They might as well have brewed up each dose in a chocolate teapot.

I say ‘spare a thought’ for him, but aside from getting momentarily slated, he hoofed away a mountain of wedge and is now probably lying on some remote desert island having peeled grapes blow-farted into his mouth by ex-Soviet gymnasts.

It all does go to show that silver bullets remain the purview of only the Lone Ranger, but life goes on, and medicine progresses to save a stratospherically higher number of lives than it has ever caused to fall into the flames.

After the shrieking dies down, everybody sees sense and pops the pills.

As for the current furore, it’s the same old story.

It’s the clots who cause the bloody rumpus, and they’ve not yet developed an effective vaccine for that.