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)_/¯