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.
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.
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.
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]
As an example, I booked my appointment specifically at a location that only carried Pfizer.
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.
I wouldn't dodge it because of it, but people might.
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.
https://www.traveloffpath.com/countries-open-for-vaccinated-...
That's already how it works, though. Everyone is free to decide for themselves whether or not they'd like to be vaccinated.
"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.
Acting in the collective self-interest is not new at all, unless you completely ignore history.
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.
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.
You also can't go to NYU if you've never had an MMR. What's your point?