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US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

bbc.co.uk

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Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#41

Post by raverbashing »

ceejayoz wrote: post #2

Six cases in seven million administered doses. One death. Meanwhile, hormonal birth control causes clots in 1/1,000 women. No one blinks an eye. The vaccine hesitancy this engenders is likely gonna kill more than that one person. https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1381936112311148548 > Public health bureaucrats have some weird habits in how they reason under uncertainty and how they communicate to the public. I…

Paraphrasing one famous science commenter, we're playing Pandemic Trolley Problem and running over hundreds of people because we're not sure if the other path has one or two persons.

It's ridiculous.

Or as per someone that actually knows statistics: https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1381925025964515330

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#43

Post by jonplackett »

graeme wrote: post #35
jonplackett wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's lots of other things to compare it to as well. It's a roughly 1 in a million chance of dying - which is called a Micromort https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micromort We 'spend' about one micromort of risk per day of being alive. Or you can spend one walking for 6 hours, or driving 250 miles (or 6 miles on a motorbike) I just made a website to show all the other stuff we do all the time without worrying with the…

Less, no? 1/million is the risk so far of clots, not of death.

There's about 1/250,000 risk of clots, but they are treatable.

In the UK there's been 19 people die after ~20 million vaccinations.

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#44

Post by peytn »

Daho0n wrote: post #9
ceejayoz wrote: post #2

Six cases in seven million administered doses. One death. Meanwhile, hormonal birth control causes clots in 1/1,000 women. No one blinks an eye. The vaccine hesitancy this engenders is likely gonna kill more than that one person. https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/1381936112311148548 > Public health bureaucrats have some weird habits in how they reason under uncertainty and how they communicate to the public. I…

People keep repeating this myth of birth control. I don't know how doctors do their job in other countries but if they look at the patients health history this number is a myth. Luckily health officials here (ETA: Denmark) inform about these myths on television whenever the government holds a press conference about new Covid-19 measures but this isn't so everywhere so please stop spreading FUD. ETA: I see you made ni…

Keeping on the myth of birth control...

> A joint statement from the FDA and CDC clarified that the blood clotting was cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST).

I don’t believe birth control is associated with CVST at a rate of 1/1000. It feels very misleading to use it as a point of comparison.

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#45

Post by ghaff »

lsllc wrote: post #31
ghaff wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>For people in the low-risk tier I don't disagree. But I will observe that many people in the low(er) risk tier are going to be traveling, eating out, having parties, etc. sooner rather than later--vaccine or not. In my very Blue state people are very obviously relaxing a whole lot more. So the question isn't whether things open up or not. It's whether people are vaccinated when they do. (Which doesn't mean all vacci…

It seems like people in the low-risk tier might be more likely to get J&J. Firstly, it's just the one shot and secondly, people who are worried about COVID are vaccine shopping because they want the perceived "higher efficacy" of the mRNA vaccines vs J&J (whereas lower-risk people might be more interested in vaccine passports than preventing symptoms).

Maybe. In a lot of places you don't really have a choice and, in the US, AFAIK the mRNA vaccines are more common. Also, while "vaccine passports" have started being discussed, they're not really a factor yet--given how many people still need to vaccinated--and may never be outside of scenarios like schools. (That said, I have heard people who see getting a vaccine as more pro forma saying they prefer J&J because it's just a single shot.)

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#46

Post by alistairSH »

pithon wrote: post #29
jonplackett wrote: post #18

I just made this website to show you how really, really small the risks are, and how they compare to risks we happily take every single day. whatoneinamillionmeans.com If you're not willing to take 1 in a million chances, it's gonna be pretty hard for you to get out of bed today. This vaccine seems to have about the same rate, which makes sense as I think it uses the same technology.

"That’s the same risk as driving London to Liverpool" This was the first one your website presented and I have no idea what it means.

London and Liverpool are major cities in England. 200 miles, 4 hours drive time, roughly.

Similar distance/time as DC to NYC.

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#47

Post by sokoloff »

ceejayoz wrote: post #19
jMyles wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take seems a little short-shrift to me. This is a highly unusual situation insofar as phase III monitoring is far from complete and there is no 'phase IV' (confirmatory) trial data at all yet. In the normal course of research, this is how we'd catch rare but consistent adverse effects. So, if we had complete trials on a normal timeframe, then obviously there's a different calculus to apply. But given what we kno…

> A pause to assess the data and allow any lag to resolve seems prudent. I don't think the drug safety system is set up to effectively evaluate the cost/benefit of the pause itself in a pandemic scenario.

None of our societal systems are setup to do rational cost-benefit trade-offs in a pandemic.

“Don’t wear masks.” “No, no: wear masks.” “COVID kills over 10%.” “COVID kills less than 0.1%.” Once we realized the difference in makeup between the over-10% and sub-0.1% populations, we still couldn’t bring ourselves to make data-backed differentiations for many, many months (and still today have many small businesses closed or restricted based on what they do rather than the risk profile of their owners and employees).

These are difficult decisions to be sure, but when being seen as on the “safe side” confers benefits without a commensurate charge for the risk of the “safe” action, you get a society which moves in the direction of perceived safety (and where perceived safety may be strongly sub-optimal).

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#48

Post by rel2thr »

School-Cotton wrote: post #20

We’ve completely transformed human civilization in a desperate attempt to slow down the spread of this virus that kills 1 in 200 people, and now we don’t want to use one of the miracle cures because of a literal one in a million chance of issues. People are absolute garbage at thinking about scale.

It’s not a sim city decision. In young healthy people the risk of covid death is much lower than 1/200 , so you gotta see why this would make people hesitate.

Re: US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

#50

Post by thornjm »

sjg007 wrote: post #22

Why are women adversely affected?

Med Student here so possibly wrong but...

There is a well established link between oestrogen and increased blood coagulability. Whilst it is possible females are more affected by the vaccine I suspect one factor is that their baseline coagulation risk increases their likelihood of thrombus due “reaction induced coagulability” compared to males.

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