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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

#681

Post by jimbokun »

tryonenow wrote: post #658
thelean12 wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not be full on anti-vax, but you're very clearly anti-science. > I expect I've had all variants No evidence of this. > and apparently my immune system is on top of it No evidence of this. > in which case there's nothing to pass on Even if the above were true, we don't know how long you'd have immunity. > and the people in my area clearly don't care if I did. They would if they caught it and had severe symptom…

Resorting to calling people "anti-science" is just as counterproductive and unnecessary as calling them "anti-vax". You're only solidifying animosity and mistrust. People have every right to question what they're being told by the same governments who mishandled this epidemic from the start - especially since there such strong political incentives that aren't necessarily aligned with scientifically based recommendati…

You are vaguely waving your hand at unspecified "political incentives" with absolutely no specifics or evidence of anything.

I mean, you can question anything, but that has about zero value. Answers with evidence backing them have value.

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

#682

Post by arcticbull »

koolba wrote: post #678
arcticbull wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Nine women cannot work together to produce a baby in one month. Similarly, while wider population testing for safety and efficacy would likely correlate with long term safety, it’s not a total substitute. I think it could be completely rational for young, healthy, low BMI people to delay vaccination till they’re more comfortable with any potential long term issues.

Well I guess it's a good thing nobody's trying to produce a baby, but rather, a vaccine. Because they succeeded, and you hand-waved away my completely rational explanation with a nonsequitur about pregnancy.

Those folks aren't being immunized to protect themselves but those around them. This is a team effort and everyone's gotta pitch in.

I got my J&J a week ago. No side-effects here.

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

#683

Post by ironmagma »

jimbokun wrote: post #681
tryonenow wrote: post #658

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Resorting to calling people "anti-science" is just as counterproductive and unnecessary as calling them "anti-vax". You're only solidifying animosity and mistrust. People have every right to question what they're being told by the same governments who mishandled this epidemic from the start - especially since there such strong political incentives that aren't necessarily aligned with scientifically based recommendati…

You are vaguely waving your hand at unspecified "political incentives" with absolutely no specifics or evidence of anything. I mean, you can question anything, but that has about zero value. Answers with evidence backing them have value.

Everything should start from a place of questioning. If there is data and the data makes sense, that can replace questioning with certainty. But often the data has a limited or tenuous connection, possibly even a fraudulent connection. This is why it’s important to actually read the studies and understand the science, not just to hand wave it away as “evidence = value.”

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

#684

Post by ketamine__ »

klebe wrote: post #679

I must say, the general state of discourse on HN has severely deteriorated over the past year (mostly in line with other online platforms, I suppose) COVID is the single worst thing to happen to civil discussion in my lifetime. The virus is obviously a risk. So are the vaccines. Acting any other way is just downright disingenuous. At the end of the day, any person with a working brain is free to calculate those risks…

Being very conservative with vaccine rollout means more people will die. I think the risk-averse folks that approved of harsh lockdowns may want this harsh measure as well.

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

#685

Post by sudosteph »

_wldu wrote: post #318
xiphias2 wrote: post #213

Why didn't they stop the vaccinations in women under age of 60/65? I'm a 40 year old man, if I were a woman I wouldn't take J&J or AstraZeneca, but as I'm a man, I think it's worth to take the risk of the side effects of the vaccination.

I wonder why all the clot victims are 100% female with J&J? Also, only 1/3 of Astra Zeneca clot victims are male: https://news.yahoo.com/astra-zeneca-vaccine-blood-clot-risk-...

I'm only speculating, but serious blood clots are also known to be possible side effects of some forms of hormonal birth control. Given the relatively young ages of the women who had side effects on J&J, I would be really interested in learning if there could be a connection there.

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

#686

Post by spikels »

HWR_14 wrote: post #515
jaegerpicker wrote: post #406

7 people out of 7 million dose's. That's why they stopped. My wife and I got the J&J shot on Saturday so I'm directly at risk and I'd take it everytime even if the risk was 10 times what it currently is. I've already seen a bunch of anit-vaxers referring to this in new articles this morning. So let's see, 1 in a million chance that the vaccine will make you sick (only 1 person has died so far, which is terrible but i…

It's not the risk of clots. It's the risk of vaccine hesitancy because people fear a cover up. I think that's outweighed by the increased vaccine hesitancy because people only hear this scary story and not the low numbers (see also AstroZeneca).

Unfortunately this "pause" will also result in vaccine hesitancy (on top of vaccination delays). We know this from the EU experience with the AstraZeneca vaccine which is now distrusted by many people.

This will almost certainly now be a problem with the J&J vaccine in the US. More people will get sick and die because of this.

https://www.politico.eu/article/trust-oxford-astrazeneca-cor...

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

#687

Post by mzs »

jjk166 wrote: post #565
greenwich26 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the past 2 weeks, the reported rate of these events associated with the AZ vaccine has gone from 1 in a million, to 1 in 30,000 [0]. [0] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2104882

The clots associated with the AZ vaccine aren't CVST.

Though there have been SVTs and DVTs the vast majority have been CVSTs with thrombocytopenia:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/apr/13/astrazeneca-bl...

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

#688

Post by shadowgovt »

klebe wrote: post #679

I must say, the general state of discourse on HN has severely deteriorated over the past year (mostly in line with other online platforms, I suppose) COVID is the single worst thing to happen to civil discussion in my lifetime. The virus is obviously a risk. So are the vaccines. Acting any other way is just downright disingenuous. At the end of the day, any person with a working brain is free to calculate those risks…

The pandemic is one of those scenarios that challenges the soul of a nation like the US.

Oh, your society believes, at a deep ethical and philosophical level, in individual freedoms, personal responsibility, and general laissez-faire attitude regarding behaviors that do no harm to others? Okay. Here's an invisible threat that is on average low-probability fatal but with wide error bars and a step-function if enough people decide to ignore it. If enough people take collective actions that are uncomfortable, inconvenient, and in some cases heavily disruptive (possibly resulting in loss of individuals' livelihoods), the odds of dying from it are minimized for everyone (but nonzero). If not enough people do these things, the odds spike up (hard to say by how much). In terms of personal responsibility, you don't know if you're spreading the disease and if someone catches it and dies, we only have probabilities to estimate responsibility regarding who it came from.

Oh, and a handful of the mitigations might also have nonzero risk of harm or death, with some noteworthy error bars on the estimates.

... and all this on top of a population that barely understands what probability is in general, let alone error bars. Most citizens are, in fact, not nearly educated enough to calculate those risks. But they sure want to think they are, because we put personal responsibility for one's health on the person.

It's like the crisis was hand-tuned to be everything Americans hate.

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

#689

Post by jonplackett »

hyko wrote: post #510
jonplackett wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just made this website to show you how really, really small the risks are for the AstraZeneca vaccine which also has this ‘issue’. It compares the risks of dying from a blood clot after the AZ vaccine (about 1 in a million) to the risks we happily take every single day. http://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

I’d probably be careful using this as a public health communication tool; you’re comparing these risks to things like flying, which people are viscerally afraid of. Not to mention that the CVST issue is a poorly understood and evolving picture, so it’s hard to confidently assert that the risk is actually a micromort. The perceptive gap between zero risk and extremely small risk is enormous. If I’m young and healthy,…

That is of course true, and you're free to weigh up the risks however you like. Also true that there are unknowns. But the benefits of the vaccine are known too, and the risks of COVID include death and long covid, which also has unknowns and does not look nice.

Let me try one more way I have been thinking about it. I'm also weighing up whether I should get the vaccine and TBH made this site as much for myself as anyone else.

The point of the site is really to show the fallacy of there currently being zero risk in your life. Comparing 'none' to 'additional' isn't really what is happening. You have risks in your life every day, every time you do anything.

On any given day you already have about 1 Micromort's chance of dying from any unnatural causes. So that's 365 a year. So getting that vaccine puts it up to 366.

That's an increase in risk of just under 0.3% for the year, from an already pretty low baseline of likelihood of dying that we enjoy these days.

This way of thinking helps me. I'm hoping it might help some others too.

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

#690

Post by JoshuaDavid »

jonplackett wrote: post #424
jaegerpicker wrote: post #406

7 people out of 7 million dose's. That's why they stopped. My wife and I got the J&J shot on Saturday so I'm directly at risk and I'd take it everytime even if the risk was 10 times what it currently is. I've already seen a bunch of anit-vaxers referring to this in new articles this morning. So let's see, 1 in a million chance that the vaccine will make you sick (only 1 person has died so far, which is terrible but i…

I just made this website to show you how really, really small the risks are for the AstraZeneca vaccine which also has this ‘issue’. It compares the risks of dying from a blood clot after the AZ vaccine (about 1 in a million) to the risks we happily take every single day. http://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

I'm not sure where you're getting your stats, but so far I've gotten

> That's about 10 times less risky than walking down the stairs

and

> That’s the same risk as driving for 5 hours

Which implies that walking down some stairs is equivalently risky to driving for 50 hours. That seems... unlikely.

There are about 150 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles in the US [1]. That means that a micromort (a 1 in a million chance of death) corresponds to about 66 miles driven, which would probably be about 2 hours of driving.

In 2000, 1,307 people died from falling down stairs[2]. The US population in 2000 was about 280 million, so 1307 / 280e6 / 365 = 1.27e-8, so the average person had about a 12.7 in 1 billion chance of dying by falling down stairs on a given day. It seems reasonable to estimate that on average, each American goes down stairs about once per day (some people never go down stairs, others go down them multiple times per day). As such, I think the estimate for "risk of going down the stairs" should be more like 10 in a billion and less like 10 in a million.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...

[2] https://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm -- "Fall on and from stairs and steps"

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