CDC panel recommends resuming use of Johnson and Johnson vaccine
axios.com
axios.com
Or not! But if we’re not going to use them, we should send them to another country like Canada or Mexico or Australia or the UK or EU, all of which have approved it and administered millions of doses.
Sitting on 10s of millions of vaccines during a pandemic is inexcusable.
Exactly zero of the J&J doses from that facility have been given to Americans. 15M J&J doses were discarded because they were contaminated with AZ ingredients. Tens of millions more are currently in quarantine awaiting other evaluations & may never be used. The facility has halted production & there are some hints it may not restart.
Some of the AZ already sent to Canada was from that plant, made under conditions that that can now only be verified imperfectly in retrospect, based on the kind of incomplete records the company has been in trouble for.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/more-than-half-canadas-...
That is, the vaccine name has been slapped on a box that offers no guarantees of containing that content.
You need to be able to trust your medicine has been produced correctly, because there’s no real way to verify it as a consumer (or as a doctor, or a pharmacist, or really anywhere after the fact). As soon as that trust is lost, the whole thing falls apart.
You don’t take risks with medicine, because it’s already doing barely controlled, barely calculated shit to the body — that we only trust to do the job it says on the tin, because of the extensive and controlled tests. If those tests are no longer valid, because the medicine involved has qualities unknown (due to improper construction), anything goes.
I'm under the impression that the US has been sending its AZ doses to Canada and Mexico since mid-March: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/18/us-astrazeneca...
https://globalnews.ca/news/7728936/astrazeneca-vaccine-doses...
But: a bigger problem is that most came from the troubled Emergent Biosolutions plant, never FDA-certified, where all of its J&J production has been held back from US use:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/us/astrazeneca-covid-vacc...
If you look at the national vaccination rate, it looks like it's starting to level off. J&J makes up a small portion of vaccinations in the US, so especially seeing how appointments are easy to get, the rush appears to be over.
What is the reason? People don't bother? Are afraid? Organizational issues?
And decisions to invest in R&D and production facilities has consequences. Canada is finally getting on the ball to build a vaccine factory that will be ready in 2024. Maybe.
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/astrazeneca-still-plans-...
Likely not much demand but a positive FDA decision can boost confidence in other markets.
“but AstraZeneca is still planning to apply for emergency use authorization of its shot in the U.S.”
planning to = has not
Of course, AZ also lost its production capacity even if it was going to be approved, since it was dependent on the troubled Emergent facility which has been taken over but J&J and dedicated exclusively tonthe J&J vaccine, and has not located new production facilities.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/blood-clots-and-t...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3551877/
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/10/what-succ...
As is the latest shingles vaccine trial: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6590925/
(14,759 patients who received two doses of HZ/su (n = 7,344) or placebo (n = 7,415))
So if 40,000 is "kinda untested" than this one must be complete and utter made-up then
The problem is that the people who haven't been vaccinated yet tend to be younger and less likely to die from covid. Granted, it's still much more deadly than the vaccine, but with mitigations and some degree of herd immunity, those odds aren't as compelling as for 65-year-olds.
Also, what are the odds of a 1 in 10k concern not being picked up as such in a 40k sample size? It would look like background noise if it was only one case in that particular group.
To be clear, I am very much pro continuing use of the vaccine, but it's not the case that every possible 1 in 40k or less concern has been discovered since we had one such group go through a controlled study. Since the odds of COVID causing serious problems are far, far higher than that, it is still a win, but we should of course learn as we go.
Or the people making the decision are incredibly risk averse and don't mind an extra few hundred or thousand Covid deaths to save a single person with a blood clot.
>Also, what are the odds of a 1 in 10k concern not being picked up as such in a 40k sample size? It would look like background noise if it was only one case in that particular group.
It's a specific type of blood clot that is incredibly rare and occurs more often in young women. If it had a 1 in 10k rarity it would have probably been found
For the former, the side effect is blot clots with thrombocytopenia. That combo is very rare, is indicative of an autoimmune etiology, and would stand out to healthcare providers and be reported. Even if there were a few cases that were not identified or reported, it would not lead to a 2x order of magnitude difference in the reported incidence as you suggest.
If your argument is a statistical one about the study being underpowered, then show your math. Because this is definitely not a small n.
Otherwise, be careful about presuming that something in a domain unfamiliar to you is equally unclear to experts in that domain.
See? you're inflating risk and misunderstanding consequences. How many people die, if nobody is vaccinated compared to a 1 in 100,000 risk of clotting? A lot more than 1 in 100,000 die from covid.
Contraceptive pill blood clot risk is for any type of blood clot, such as deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, etc [0].
The vaccine cerebral venous sinus thrombosis blood clot risk is something like 1 in 100k+ (as you mentioned), but during J&J FDA trials of 20k people there were 50% more blood clots of other various types in the vaccinated group [1] (15 blood clots in vaccinated group versus 10 in the placebo group, which the FDA did not consider statistically significant at the time)
You may be comparing fatal-only vaccine blood clots to non-fatal contraception blood clots, and ignoring non-fatal vaccine blood clots.
I'm not saying this to throw the vaccine under the bus, just pointing out that the comparison of the odds you presented might not be fair.
[0] https://thefemedic.com/contraception/blood-clots-thrombosis-...
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/13/health/johnson-vaccine-blood-...
At the time vaccination was paused, here were 6 known cases of CVST, 2 fatal, in 6.8 million vaccinated.
To come up with 1 in 250,000 like the OP, you need to consider only women (~3.5 million doses), count all cases (not just the fatalities), and assume more than half of the cases were not reported.
Why? That would that be a ridiculously impractical recommendation (do we even have the capacity to run millions of full panel blood tests a week?) and completely useless for detecting the problems people are worried about. TTS[1] isn’t something subtle you need a blood test for.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...
I just feel like more data is better, the scientist don't seem to understand the mechanism that causes this problem and why it affects a few people but not most.
Your link links the problem to low platelet count, is the vaccine affecting platelets in other people but not enough to manifest the issue? Maybe more data could help figure out why it happened to those handful of people and not others.
The J&J vaccine causes headaches and pains normally , I was down and out for a couple days, I could easily see someone with the issue thinking its normal and waiting too long to go in for help.
Had the J&J shot three weeks ago. Did not feel a thing. My arm was slightly sore at injection site. Nothing else. I guess my body was used to it and just sort of shrugged it off.
Some of my friends who got J&J were sick for a few days, but rebounded quickly after that.
From https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/faq.html :
> If I have already had COVID-19 and recovered, do I still need to get vaccinated with a COVID-19 vaccine?
> Yes, you should be vaccinated regardless of whether you already had COVID-19. That’s because experts do not yet know how long you are protected from getting sick again after recovering from COVID-19. Even if you have already recovered from COVID-19, it is possible—although rare—that you could be infected with the virus that causes COVID-19 again.
Another thing is that, although it hasn't been scientifically studied yet, there are some reports that getting vaccinated has helped some COVID long haulers with their symptoms:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/03/31/9827994...
Since when has not knowing something been justification for intervention?
Given that people have been getting sick from COVID-19 for at least as long as vaccines have been available for testing, shouldn't experts have a reasonable understanding of whether previously infected people are as protected as recently vaccinated people, or how often (or rare) it is that people can be infected with the virus again?
At some point, they'll declare the campaign a success. We'll never get to see the real data because they aren't collecting it. There's no centralized reporting or control.
In the US, there has been 32M cases reported so far, and who knows how many asymptomatic cases that were never counted. Since a large portion of cases are asymptomatic, the total case count could be multiples of the confirmed case count.
The clinical trials will never be replicated, it will just be 'oops, pandemic over, we assumed it all worked.'
In the end, I did get some side effects, but nothing long term - a hard, hot to the touch, red circle of about 4" diameter formed around the injection site, and I could barely move my arm away from my body without significant pain, both for about a week.
It's actually quite simple for me I'm traveling internationally again and the the first country on my list is a lot easier to get into if you're fully vaccinated. It seems like things will coalesce around people who are vaccinated having greater access to things, at least until enough of the world population is vaccinated that it doesn't matter.
Perhaps you got better because your innate immune system cleared Covid--you may not have antibodies. Perhaps your immune system keyed off something screwball on the virus--you may have antibodies that are less effective for other variants. I can go on.
Getting the vaccine means that I know I have antibodies to the spike protein in particular--which seems to be common to all the variants.
„What prompted you to get a vaccine when you have already had COVID?“
This study therefore estimated protection against reinfection was 78.8%.
That's higher than the 72% efficacy offered by the J&J vaccine.
[1]https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/l-tls031821....
Apparently around 8 months. Source: https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/12/two-stud...
There is also preliminary evidence [1] to indicate that post-infection vaccination can help to resolve lingering symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness, and insomnia.
[0]: https://www.journalofinfection.com/article/S0163-4453(20)305...
Vaccine-based immunity allows for a greater variance in neutralizing antibodies to form relative to the spike protein, compared to natural immunity attacking less critical vectors. Get the vaccine even if you had covid
It's not a binary "You have COVID" vs "You don't have COVID". Not for vaccines, nor for re-infections.
I don't think the word "rare" applies any longer. Reinfection is becoming more common. Here is some info CDC released a few days ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/21/health/vaccine-nursing-ho...
An unvaccinated health care worker set off a Covid-19 outbreak at a nursing home in Kentucky where the vast majority of residents had been vaccinated, leading to dozens of infections, including 22 cases among residents and employees who were already fully vaccinated, a new study reported Wednesday.
It is unhelpful and disingenuous to suggest that lack of antibodies imply lack of immunity or that rare edge cases are the norm. In disease, there are always edge cases.
The Trumps both received vaccines before leaving the Whitehouse even though they had prior covid infection. I know at least 4 people with prior covid infection who have received vaccines
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/info-by-product/clinic...
>Data from clinical trials indicate that the currently authorized COVID-19 vaccines can be given safely to people with evidence of a prior SARS-CoV-2 infection. People should be offered vaccination regardless of history of prior symptomatic or asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection. Viral testing to assess for acute SARS-CoV-2 infection or serologic testing to assess for prior infection is not recommended for the purposes of vaccine decision-making.
The unfortunate thing is the level of ignorance today mistakes a very careful effort make sure the vaccine is safe with a wanton ignoring of some danger.
Beyond talking about the fact that they determined this was safe, at some point educating people on danger in statistical terms is going to be necessary. But I'm not sure how that happens - addiction to headline-logic and single-heart-pulling-events is a huge part of the news industry.
http://whatoneinamillionmeans.com
The idea is to compare the risk of death from the AZ vaccine from blood clots (1 in a million so far) with the risks we take all the time without worrying.
For there J+J vaccine, it's also a 1 in a million risk, but just of getting the clots, not dying.
The point is to show the fallacy of comparing the risk of the vaccine with a perceived current zero risk - you are not at zero risk ever, there's a base-risk we as society and individuals have decided we are OK with, because without it we can't even get out of bed in the morning, let alone get into a car or do anything else interesting, and the risk from these vaccines is a lot lower than that.
Your denominator could be wrong when you factor in the attributes of the individual considering the shot. Are the blood clots appearing entirely randomly or are they happening more frequently in an identifiable sub-group of vaccine recipients? In the case of the J+J vaccine all the blood clots happened in women 18-48 years old.
https://www.insider.com/blood-clots-after-jj-covid-vaccine-o...
Do you know if anyone has died from the J+J one? Because that's what I am comparing with for the AZ one, so it's actually in that sense less risky that AZ anyway.
It's tricky cause it depends on what you do (you get to do more once you are vaccinated), as well as the ever-changing rate of infection in the community where you are (which will change as more people get vaccinated among other things).
But in general, your risk of having severe complications from covid if unvaccinated is far more than your risk of complications from the vaccine.
And on the population level, we can say if say 1 million people get the vaccine, X will have blood clot complications (about 1)... if 1 million people go two months without being vaccinated, how many will get covid and have severe complications? (more than X). So if using the J&J gets a million people vaccinated two months earlier, it's a win.
Of course, ALL of this is an embaressment of riches when the USA has access to large quantities of three effective and safe vaccines, when much of the planet still has zero.
For older people, getting the vaccine is a no brainer. The risk of covid is high, they can't see their grand kids etc, so they're lining up to get vaccinated.
For young people, the risk from Covid is low, but we need everyone to get vaccinated anyway because that's the only way to stop it spreading, infecting more vulnerable people, maybe even mutating enough to escape the vaccine.
So what this is about is asking people who might not be at that much risk from covid, to get a vaccine that they're also not that much at risk from (but might worry about with all the negative headlines), in order to save all the other people and the economy and country / world as a whole.
Are you sure about this? I thought the J&J 1 in a million number was deaths, from cerebral venous sinus thrombosis blood clots? Isn't that why they paused this vaccine?
There are many other kinds of blood clots (deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, etc). During J&J FDA trials they found a 50% increase in blood clots of any type in the vaccinated group [0], which they did not consider statistically significant at the time (20k people, 15 versus 10 blood clots in the unvacinated group). That might be an increased 1 in 4k risk of a blood clot from the vaccine, with the fatal ones being 1 in a million so far.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/13/health/johnson-vaccine-blood-...
> Beyond talking about the fact that they determined this was safe
And so there is a miniscule risk associated with J&J - that is the truth, or the half-truth. The whole truth is that your odds of catching and dying from COVID-19 are significantly higher than an adverse reaction to the J&J vaccine.
So, even with the blot clot risk (which can be caught/treated), you should absolutely have the J&J vaccine if you have the chance to.
If you treat people like adults and let them consult their doctors and make their own decisions, the bar is much lower for safety (by lower I mean from impossibly high to reasonable). People willingly take much more risky medicines and treatments all the time and are fine with it. But if you try and force something in them, it's not surprising they push back on anything that isn't guaranteed to be perfect.
(So my point is, I think demand would be higher and concerns lower if you just made it available and let people make their own choice. But the whole pandemic has been more about forcing people to do things than about trying to do things that actually solve the problem)
[Edit- it's funny how any presence of giving people control over their bodies evaporates in a situation like this. And re the strawman that "nobody is forcing you" - if the consequence is severe limits on what you are allowed to do, that doesnt really hold up]
That's already how it works, though. Everyone is free to decide for themselves whether or not they'd like to be vaccinated.
You also can't go to NYU if you've never had an MMR. What's your point?
"The mugger didn't force you give him your money. You could have chosen to say no. You being killed is just you not being free of the consequences of your choice".
Imposing consequences on people is coercing them to make the choice you want them to. None of the consequences mentioned are natural consequences, like getting sick from the disease, but additional consequences someone decided on.
Someone not taking the vaccine is imposing consequences on everyone else around them and society at large, raising the risk of immune-escape variants, raising transmission risk to people that can't take it for medical reasons, raising the risk even for vaccine-protected people by defeating herd immunity (J&J gives 72% protection, so you're running a fair risk if the rest of society isn't vaccinated.)
The consequences you complain of are pretty much just pricing in those externalities to the decision.
The thrust of my argument is that imposing negative consequences (irrespective of reason) is a form of coercion. There are many things that ought to be coerced, but it is ridiculous to assert in the face of imposed consequences that people aren't being coerced or forced into taking vaccines.
People might not want to state it that strongly and the coercion isn't as strong as what criminals or the government can impose, but it's still someone or someones using their power to enforce behavior on others.
And couching that in phrases like "pricing in those externalities" doesn't change this. In fact it makes it more blatant.
So under your expansive definition - which IMO is not the right or correct one - sure, people are getting coerced into getting vaccines. And if they aren't coerced, it's coercion against the rest of the population.
That's why your definition isn't useful and isn't used, and "coercion" is generally used for a specific set of acts.
It's also something that is impossible to know because you don't have the right to inspect someone's medical records.
And a small fraction of people who are vaccinated won't develop a proper immune response, so they are still vulnerable. Nevertheless, once enough people are vaccinated it will die out.
Freedom is a process of give and take - the only way to have perfect freedom is to deny freedom from everyone else (since you're declaring your choices more important than those around you). We (I assume you mean America - where I was born and raised but since emigrated from) have never had unlimited freedom - rights and privileges have always been limited by the interests of others from traffic laws to gun ownership and even to mere communication.
I will say that the US has tried quite hard to be on the side of individual freedom over societal freedom and health whenever possible (which has led to some side effects) - that certainly can't be argued. But the US is not an anarchist state and the presence of laws - even of encoded privileges - dictates the lack of full freedom.
There's another level to consider that is a bit more rare in discussions like this though. You don't have the personal value to be held responsible for your actions - if you happen to be the person who mutates a new strain of the virus over irresponsible actions then it sucks for the rest of us since you're judgement proof. When it comes to the trillions of dollars in lost economic productivity that you should be on the hook for we can't collect even a fraction of that.
Acting in the collective self-interest is not new at all, unless you completely ignore history.
Most places say when you sign up which they will have for your appointment, but if they do not you can often tell by looking at the eligibility. If they are offering appointments to people age 16+, they are using Pfizer. If 18+, Moderna.
Most places here also tell you on the signup form that your second appointment will be the same time and place exactly N weeks after the first. If N = 3, they are using Pfizer. If N = 4, Moderna.
As an example, I booked my appointment specifically at a location that only carried Pfizer.
I wouldn't dodge it because of it, but people might.
It seems it would be harder for the government to insert a "biological backdoor" into a viral vector vaccine than something that runs any RNA code as long as it's encoded in a special lipid delivery system (according to my limited understanding). 1 in 250k chance of blood clots is nothing... at least compared to the anxiety of the government having a switch in my biology that could melt my brain at anytime.
https://www.traveloffpath.com/countries-open-for-vaccinated-...
Unfortunately, the control arm for this study is a placabo instead of a single dose, which I would expect to be the standard of care.
The same sort of clots occur in people who have been given heparin (a blood thinner). It's even called "heparin induced" in people using heparin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-vaccination_embolic_and_t...
People on either vaccine have been found to have an immune response to "platelet factor 4" (PF4). PF4s job is to moderate substances like heparin.
I wonder if PF4 is similar to spike protein somehow?
I wonder how long the immune response lasts?
I guess it's not super useful as it wouldn't make sense to give people a blood thickener (a coagulant?) prophylacticly. Maybe we need to consider whether this is appropriate for people on Heparin or similar medications? I'm no doctor so don't take this as discouragment, I'm just musing. I have Oxford AZ (1 dose so far) and it was fine.
it may be not only PF4:
..of 2,688 human proteins. In some of his own covid patients he found antibodies targeting 30 other important signaling agents besides interferon,
Antibodies which: can somehow be created by covid itself , have the potential to last a lifetime.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26915143
I guess that the spike another function could be a trap for the immune system and antibodies - resulting in production of autoantibodies - and that's very wise choice, which parts of that trap/virus are used in vaccines.
I had a vax-sceptic friend send me an article from a reputable source, quoting claims from the National Health Agencies and WHO etc. about the 'blood clots' which essentially conclude that 'they are rare and treatable' ... but my friends 'interpretation' was that the vax was 'unsafe'. She literally couldn't grasp that the data in the article was supposed to make her conclude it was 'safe'. She just read 'fear'.
40% of developed world people are either 'not very literate' or 'not paying attention' or have 'reading comprehension' problems whereing they are not going to engage with the material to derive conclusions.
While the public health agencies decisions are a little cautious, they are reasonable, but the 'communications' of it via random articles with bits of 'facts' is a complete disaster from a Public Communications perspective and is causing probably measurable harm.
If there is a 'marginal risk' of 4 in 1 million of 'blood clotting' and it's entirely treatable, then this information should be made available and transparent during the official conferences, but it should not be headline news.
Whenever material information is presented regarding concerns, they have to be contextualized, and if the conclusion is effectively 'the vax is perfectly safe, this is just an administrative thing' then this has to be repeated over and over.
From the FDA: "Out of every 10,000 women taking birth control pills, 3 to 9 of them will develop a blood clot".
That is about 100x greater than clotting from AstraZeneca Vaccine, and 10's of millions of American women are taking it daily. Now that's context.
Every single story about COVID needs to start and end with the 'Net reality facts' about vaccination, which as of today is: 'It's utterly safe, basically for everyone, and it will help stop the spread and keep other safe'.
When messaging critical information for the masses it needs to be simple, clear, consistent, repetitive, words need to be chosen very carefully, and assume you're dealing with a 'Grade 8' audience in terms of net comprehension/attention/understanding.
Almost all intelligent professionals live in bubbles, we tend to have no grasp of how it is out there for a large swath of the population.
Even public health agencies web-sites are overloaded with information, literally with critical information in 'downloadable PDFs' (???), it's not good, I hope we develop a new approach but I don't think we will.
> That is about 100x greater than clotting from AstraZeneca Vaccine, and 10's of millions of American women are taking it daily. Now that's context.
More context: the vaccine clots have been in the brain, birth control clots tend to occur in the legs (and rarely in the lungs). You can use heparin to treat the latter, but heparin could make the brain clot from the vaccine worse. I’m no medical professional, so I’ll let this article do the heavy lifting: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/04/23/fac...
Despite that, the odds seem to favor using the J&J vaccine based on numbers. The reported clot cases and total vaccines are 6 in 6.7 million with 1 death. If those odds are extrapolated, this means approximately 1150 people would die if everyone on earth received the J&J vaccine, and 6600 would have blood clots.
All of the cases were in women of roughly child-bearing age, give them an option/priority for the mRNA vaccines, see if clots occur in other demographic groups.
I had the J&J shot, and would do so again.
I completely agree with what you are saying, but wanted to point out that the risk of a cerebral venous sinus thrombosis blood clot risk is something like 4 in 1 million, but there are other kinds of blood clots (deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, etc).
During J&J FDA trials of 20k people there were 50% more blood clots of other various types in the vaccinated group [0] (15 blood clots in vaccinated group versus 10 in the placebo group, which the FDA did not consider statistically significant at the time).
It might not be fair to compare J&J cerebral venous sinus thrombosis blood clots only to blood clots of any type from birth control pills.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/13/health/johnson-vaccine-blood-...
How many deaths are associated with each vaccine at this point? Show me the data.
'The data' is available for you out there on Google. The calculus the public health officials are making I think is reasonable.
One could imagine pausing: "oh, they are being careful, great, and NOW after looking at it, they've determined it is safe." (The pausing is actually a consequence of the sped-up approval; the sped-up approval process comes with a requirement to pay extra extra scrutiny to any side effects reported) OR "See, they admit it's not safe, they paused it!"
Same with not pausing: "See they rushed the approval, and now they are ignoring side effects" OR just nobody hears about the side effects without the publicity, or figures they must not be a big deal if they didn't even bother pausig it or whatever.
Could go either way. The difference in either case is probably determined by building up trust over time, by transparency, and by having an effective communications/education/marketing plan (specifically for communications around the side effects/pause).
In the USA, of course, we have none of that. So it was probably going to decrease confidence either way. What a country!
In the meantime, health officials will need to convince the public to take J&J’s shot. Americans’ confidence in Covid-19 vaccines continues to rise, according to a poll from the de Beaumont Foundation, an advocacy group focused on public health. But it has taken a toll on trust in J&J’s shot, specifically, with nearly one-third of respondents saying they’d never take the single-dose vaccine.
(https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-23/five-thin...)
The media is just drumming up controversy where there is none.
The alternatives to being open and acknowledging rare side-effects are worse.
I sure don't want to get the Russian Sputnik vaccine because I have zero trust the Russians would sweep rare side-effects under the rug.
Implicit to this point is that what the CDC/FDA did was "good science" and not bad science.
they did the safe thing, regardless of the politics. if you're skeptical about vaccines you should be reassured by that. and if a person is skeptical about vaccines but somehow isn't reassured by the authorities taking responsible safety precautions, they're probably not coming from a place of reason and there's not much point worrying what they think.
The downvotes are puzzling. Are people capable of countering with reason, or is a downvote a proxy vote for how they wish reality to be?
This would be a confounding effect when trying to determine whether it was the uncertainty that caused the distrust, or the source of the statement.
Citation needed.
> In an era of declining public trust of institutions...
In such an era we need institutions to display integrity above and beyond. That means not letting unfounded vaccine skepticism affect how rollout is conducted.
> I argue this pause was poor politics.
Was this a political decision?
Example: As I understood it, choosing not to go with AZ in Denmark was not a political decision.
This is what the UK is doing with AstraZeneca, for the exact same problem! Only suggesting it to people over 30! Stop downvoting the suggestion which is literally expert advice!
Hopefully if anything the pause has shown anti-vax folks that the safety of these vaccines is being taken seriously.
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/why-comparing-blood-clot-r...
> Indeed, government health officials are investigating a type of blood clot called a cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST) among the J&J recipients. These clots formed in the draining veins of the brain, combined with a low platelet count, essentially causing a stroke. Hormonal birth control pills, on the other hand, raise the risk of blood clots in the leg that can break off and travel to the lung, causing a pulmonary embolism that blocks blood flow to part of the lung. The latter clots can be treated with anticoagulants, while the J&J clots cannot.
One seems to be far more deadly than the other.
I don't know if we'll get better numbers on other types of J&J blood clots from the CDC at some point, but I've noticed the same as you that people are comparing J&J cerebral blood clot deaths to birth control clots of any type and that doesn't look like a fair comparison to me, either.
[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/13/health/johnson-vaccine-blood-...
It's an individual decision, and although there are many factors both individual and societal, it's counterproductive to yell (or jokingly imply, as Munroe did in your link) "antivaxxer!!" whenever someone has some concern.
Many European health authorities have e.g. concluded that the risk of death from the AstraZeneca vaccine is greater than the risk of Covid infection in young people. Unless one assumes that these health authorities are wrong, this would indeed be an example where a time-limited amount of caution wasn't obviously irrational.
Was it a black swan event that one of the ~7 vaccines that passed clinical trials turned out to fail the risk/benefit ratio in some regions? No, that's probably to be expected with the probabilities involved.
We can still have confidence both in vaccines and health authorities after such an event, my point is that saying "you're stupid" in intellectual-ese is rarely the most productive response. Not everyone who has some concern is a rabid conspiracy theorist.
Like, there's an Ebola vaccine that was approved in the last couple years.
The anti vaxx community is uninterested in science. This won't change anything.
I know people who have gone from "The US government has a long history of medical experimentation on people with my skin tone" to vaccination evangelists over the last few months. This isn't yet quite one of those issues where people are locked in to a narrow bimodal distribution.
A much larger group of people is skeptical of the government and vaccines. These people might get vaccinated, and every piece of information that comes out in favor of vaccination has the possibility to sway some of them.
My post was about the first group, not the second.
I care about whether the vaccine is safe. I would be seriously concern if officials take anti-vaxx into consideration.
The vast majority of skeptics will not be convinced by this, because their skepticism is not rooted in the science.
The rest of us are just parroting them. Yes you can try to be informed and read-up but at the end of the day they're still a layperson.
I work in biotech (vaccines), and outside of my little niche, I'm just your average lay person, just slightly more informed.
That is not science, and it is not what is meant when people talk about trusting the science. Science is empiricism. The science that supports the efficacy of vaccination is the data from the trials that shows a reduction in cases. The science supporting safety is similar. This data is something anyone can understand with sufficient knowledge about probability and statistics. That level of knowledge is somewhat rare, but nowhere near as uncommon as the theoretical knowledge you are describing.
>The science that supports the efficacy of vaccination is the data from the trials that shows a reduction in cases. This data is something anyone can understand with sufficient knowledge about probability and statistics.
Yes you have a bunch of numbers, but this doesn't tell you whether the study protocol was good, nor does it tell you about the qualitative aspects like how well the study protocol was adhered to, how tight the controls were, etc. Naturally, this is not a new problem, and we have various safeguards already in place at various levels. You also need a third party like say the FDA to audit and examine what was done.
>This data is something anyone can understand with sufficient knowledge about probability and statistics.
Yes, but that is not all. People need to understand how clinical trials are conducted, and how for e.g. efficacy numbers can't simply be used to trivially compare two vaccine candidates.
They didn't permit a singular use of "they" until like 2017. Sometimes they get stuff wrong. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No side effects for me besides my arm sore to the touch the day after, but not painful. Similar to the day after a weightlifting workout.
(Note that while I work in biotech, I'm not claiming to be an expert on this topic, so don't take these as definitive claims of truth. People shouldn't be taking HN comments as a source of any kind of medical advice anyway.)
Then this clotting news happened, and I subsequently got my appointment - Pfizer. So I guess I got what I wanted.
My wife is perfectly fine though, no side effects. If given the J&J vaccine, I would have taken it too.
Why the downvotes? it is a legit answer to the OP's question
They could have issued a warning first, with the group ages/sex that they were seeing the clots (it was mostly women). Now they are scaring the 'indecisive' part of the population, and just making sure the pandemic will keep going.
Both the CDC and the FDA have completely dropped the ball during this pandemic. They are acting like typical bureaucrats, with the 'you don't fired if you buy IBM' type of mentality, and instead of being aggressive, they are just acting in a way so they don't get fired.
They should have done challenge trials back in April last year, and ask for military style of mobilization on productions, instead of just doing the normal/usual trails.
It would have speedup the vaccine rollout even more, and perhaps save at least 200k lives or more. (mask requirements on the Federal level, would have saved another 100-200k people).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNyAovuUxro - DarkHorse Podcast with Geert Vanden Bossche & Bret Weinstein
https://www.snopes.com/news/2021/03/26/geert-vanden-bossche/
Seems like he has financial interest in claiming the vaccines are dangerous.
(Bret Weinstein is leaning hard into the IDW thing. DarkHorse? Really?)
The gist: Mass infection prevention and mass vaccination with leaky Covid-19 vaccines in the midst of the pandemic can only breed highly infectious variants
Source: the top of the home page of his website, which is the first result on a google search of his name (How hard did you try?)