US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

That's not really true. The phase 1 trials were a good bit faster than they'd normally be. Also, even if you ignore that, having years of phase 2 and phase 3 trials gives you a lot of additional safety data, in the form of larger trials with longer duration. Also, better cross-tabs, so that it's possible to assess safety by age, gender, race, pregnancy, etc.

The vaccine trials were limited in their power to detect rare events. The Pfizer trial [1], for example, explicitly said that events rarer than 0.01% are less likely to be detected:

> This trial and its preliminary report have several limitations. With approximately 19,000 participants per group in the subset of participants with a median follow-up time of 2 months after the second dose, the study has more than 83% probability of detecting at least one adverse event, if the true incidence is 0.01%, but it is not large enough to detect less common adverse events reliably. This report includes 2 months of follow-up after the second dose of vaccine for half the trial participants and up to 14 weeks’ maximum follow-up for a smaller subset. Therefore, both the occurrence of adverse events more than 2 to 3.5 months after the second dose and more comprehensive information on the duration of protection remain to be determined. Although the study was designed to follow participants for safety and efficacy for 2 years after the second dose, given the high vaccine efficacy, ethical and practical barriers prevent following placebo recipients for 2 years without offering active immunization, once the vaccine is approved by regulators and recommended by public health authorities. Assessment of long-term safety and efficacy for this vaccine will occur, but it cannot be in the context of maintaining a placebo group for the planned follow-up period of 2 years after the second dose.

Even a 0.001% risk is not small, when you're talking about giving the vaccines to billions of people.

(I don't mean to single out Pfizer here. It's just the one I've read most recently.)

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejmoa2034577

Yes, with the key point that the people who are most at risk of dying from the vaccine are a different set of people than those most at risk of dying from COVID.

> Agreed, I've had all other vaccines, but this batch is rushed, experimental, and not necessary for me - labelling people such as myself "anti-vaxers" is just dishonest, bitter, childish, name calling.

No, it's not. That's a misunderstanding of how the vaccine development process works and what takes time.

What takes time in the normal course of development is testing the vaccine, yes. Specifically, determining how effective it is. The reason that takes so long is that in general there are very, very few cases of most of the diseases vaccines are developed to prevent -- and you can't just go giving people Ebola to check how many of them catch it.

It's fearmongering, plain and simple.

There's mountains of data for your perusal online explaining how and why it got done fast -- here's one example. [1]

[1] https://www.immunology.org/coronavirus/connect-coronavirus-p...

J&J must not be paying the right people...

It's not dishonest. It's a very adequate answer to the over-simplifying claim above. I.e. there is a difference between a newer and an older platform and there is a difference between an experimental platform and a new platform (that's not experimental but has been in development for a long time).

You can always argue for making things slower and experiments longer, the problem is, that there is a pandemic going on with 3M deaths in the past year. Actually people seem to think that you can develop vaccines without being rushed, but it doesn't seem to be the case. There are several reasons why other vaccines took years:

- it was a long time ago and scientists had a lot less knowledge, experience and older technology. (Think e.g. the mRNA vaccines, which J&J is not one of, where the first candidate could be completed in something like 2 weeks after the isolation and sequencing of the virus.) - they had to start from 0 for a new virus (because they new less, etc.). Like for the polio, or HIV. In the case of SARS-CoV2, they could build a lot on the experiments from SARS-CoV1. As far as I know, there was a vaccine candidate back in 2003, but by the time it would go into phase-3, the epidemic was over. Also, it seems that research never stopped about the coronavirus vaccines, so there were new results between 2003 and 2020 that the mRNA vaccines built on. - some viruses are easier to develop a vaccine for. (E.g. the HIV is not one of them, because it's very good at evading the immune system) - I've already mentioned this, but if the vaccine candidate doesn't get ready on time because of the above reasons, then you may have to wait for years before you can do a phase3 trial because there will be no people getting infected, so you won't be able to measure the effectiveness. This is what happened with the ebola vaccine in 2014. Now the vaccine is 7 years old, but it doesn't make it any safer, because there weren't people who could be vaccinated. (Well, of course, you could vaccinate them and wait for any long term side effect, just in case, that would show up without being infected, but that doesn't seem like a very important data point.)

But again: why would you want to wait for several years in a situation like this when we do have a pretty clear picture of both the worst case risks of the vaccines and the risks of the disease (which are higher than the worst case risks of the vaccines).