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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

#701

Post by thelean12 »

rajin444 wrote: post #662
thelean12 wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not insisting that a claim is true just because an authority says it is. You can't just bring up "appeal to authority" and call it a day. I'm insisting that the average unqualified individual should not think they have a better chance of being correct over the authorities in question. There's no other rational option for unqualified individuals than to listen to medical authorities unless you have a medical degre…

How does authorities being wrong / changing their recommendations factor in to what your consider a rational option? If you were a high risk individual back in January 2020 who ignored their advice and quarantined + wore a mask (an effective mask, i.e N-95), you made the right choice. Despite how much smarter and informed humanity is, we still make decisions based on trust. Science can only explain so much and runs o…

> If you were a high risk individual back in January 2020 who ignored their advice and quarantined + wore a mask (an effective mask, i.e N-95), you made the right choice.

Did they? Or was the chance they'd come in contact with Covid at that point very low and those masks would be of much better use at hospitals where the chance of coming into contact with Covid was very high? At least, that was what the experts were saying at the time. I donated my N-95 masks (that I had from California fires) not because we thought they didn't do anything in January 2020, but because the experts said they were of better use in hospitals.

> Science can only explain so much and runs out of answers eventually.

You say this as if there's a better place to find answers. Where is that place?

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

#702

Post by js2 »

The risk of dying from a blood clot after receiving the J&J vaccine is six in 6,800,000 (6.8M). The world population is 7,900,000,000 (7.9B). If everyone on the planet got the J&J vaccine tomorrow, and if it is the cause of the clots, then 6,971 people would die from the vaccine.

Yesterday, Covid19 killed 8,803 people (according to worldometers).

We don't want anyone to die from vaccination, and we don't fully understand what the clotting issue is, so it probably makes sense to pause using J&J as long as the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna) have not been implicated (which they haven't). OTOH, if this being in the news causes fewer people to get vaccinated, pausing it may be a mistake that will cause more overall deaths.

Now, your risk of dying either from vaccination or Covid19 depends on various demographic factors not accounted for in my math above. But, nonetheless, the risk of dying from the J&J vaccine is really, really, really tiny.

Like, if I knew there was a 0.00009% chance my car were going to explode every time I got in it and started it, I would not be at all nervous about starting my car everyday for the rest of my life. I'm way more likely, even accounting for my age demographic, to choke to death eating dinner tonight (5,051 deaths from choking in the U.S. in 2015 of which 2,848 were older than 74).

Edit: lifetime risk of car exploding assuming I start it every day for 50 years is about 1.6%. Okay, maybe I wouldn't play that game.

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

#703

Post by robrenaud »

t_sawyer wrote: post #607
hedora wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better to write the town off to the pandemic. I mean, we’re in the middle of a fourth surge, so realistically, double digit percentages of the town are likely to get covid if we delay even a few weeks, but 10% of 0.5% the population dying from covid and increased spreading of the new variants are reasonable prices to pay to avoid 1 in a million side effects. We can make a statue for the people that die in the followi…

You think 10% of a towns population will die from COVID in a couple weeks? Has that percentage of people in any county in the USA actually died from COVID in over a year? Florida who has been pretty laissez-faire about COVID has 5,980 deaths in Miami-Dade County (their highest amount of deaths in a county). 2.717M population in 2019. 0.22% of their population.

He estimates an additional 10% (increased spread of covid infection due to change in vaccine policy) of .5% (death rate given covid infection) of a towns population will die from covid due to vaccine hesistancy.

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

#704

Post by Izkata »

croes wrote: post #345
hedora wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. The US is apparently already at ~50% antibodies, not counting vaccination. So, there’s a floor on the upside of the vaccine: It did no more than halve deaths. We’re in the middle of a surge, and it looks like most of the remaining 50% will end up catching covid before being vaccinated, so the percentage saved by vaccination will continue to drop. The ideal strategy without hindsight was conventional wisdom: Pro…

You can't really protect the vulnerable, especially when the vaccines wasn't developed. Any source for the 50% antibody claim?

> You can't really protect the vulnerable, especially when the vaccines wasn't developed.

If true, then social distancing, masks, and lockdowns couldn't have done anything for the rest of us for the past year either.

The argument for "protect the vulnerable" is that these precautions could be more targeted and so, hopefully, more effective.

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

#706

Post by mzs »

fastball wrote: post #362
gnfargbl wrote: post #261

For AstraZeneca and not J&J, but these slides from the University of Cambridge do a better job of communicating the balance of risks than I possibly could: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Yeah, the problem though is that we have a Tragedy of the Commons situation on our hands. There is a non-negligible portion of the population that wants to have its cake and eat it too – reduce the risk that they will suffer health consequences from COVID-19 by letting everyone else get the vaccine, but not getting the vax themselves, therefore putting their risk from vax at zero.

or just run PF4 for everyone concerned after adenovirus vector vaccinations

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

#707

Post by josefx »

lghh wrote: post #498
FunnyLookinHat wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah and we only just started to roll this vaccine out - so it's fair to say that the risk will likely grow beyond that. You're right that 7 / 7,000,000 are good odds, and most people would likely take them - but it would be unwise to not give people an educated choice between vaccines if there are known risks.

> but it would be unwise to not give people an educated choice between vaccines if there are known risks They are not giving people an educated choice, they are taking that choice away until they deem it okay to give it back. Education is knowing that 7/7,000,000 had a blood clot + the other tests that were done leading up to its release. We know that now. We're educated.

> They are not giving people an educated choice

Hard to give people an educated choice without looking into the issue first. Once they know what is going on it will most likely be back to normal. There was a similar issue in Europe, but that neatly overlapped with a delivery shortage of the affected vaccine.

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

#708

Post by fspeech »

kypro wrote: post #475
base698 wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50 would certainly cover all life stages of humans. I assume you could be sure with shorter. I have an aviation, biochem, and skydiving background. My rule is for aviation: "if it hasn't been out five years you're a test jumper." Humans are way more complex than airplanes. I personally wouldn't take the mRNA vaccine because of this rule. Coupled with being unable to sue or get help from the government I think people…

I'd be happy to take the vaccine if I was in a higher risk group and I'll be happy to take the vaccine in a year or two, but right now I just don't think it's right decision for someone like myself. Given my risk is very low I'm not too worried about COVID, but I am a little worried (perhaps wrongly) about the risk of finding out about some long-term side effect from these vaccines a few months down the road. I suffe…

There is no reason to expect that side effects from the vaccine are not present or actually dramatically higher from the live virus. An infection by the virus, even if asymptomatic, will likely introduce way more alien genetic material and viral proteins into your body than the non-reproducing vaccine ever would. So one should trust the FDA panel of experts on risk unless there's strong evidence pointing otherwise.

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

#709

Post by Decabytes »

ffggvv wrote: post #544
textman wrote: post #322

"The incidence of cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) varies between studies, but it is estimated to be between 2 and 5 per million per year. A recent study in the Netherlands with comprehensive ascertainment suggested a much higher incidence." https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/STROKEAHA.116.0... So the six reported cases in 6.8 million vaccinations seems low. Glad I read about all this because I got the J&J…

seems like they were all young women. so let’s say young women make up 1/4 of those vaccinated. for them it’s more like 1/250k

That’s what I keep saying! People are saying it’s 1 in a million chance, but unless all the people who got the vaccine were women than it’s not. The instance could be far higher but it’s not possible to know without knowing how many were given to men vs women

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

#710

Post by ggreer »

yellow_postit wrote: post #548
ggreer wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a single one of those health authorities allowed vaccine challenge trials. That tells you how much they care about saving lives versus how much they care about not getting blamed for any deaths.

It does appear that challenge trials are starting, a search easily turned up this UK one: https://ukcovidchallenge.com/covid-19-volunteer-trials/ The main benefit of challenge trials is to speed up development as I understand it not to broaden risk estimates.

> The main benefit of challenge trials is to speed up development as I understand it not to broaden risk estimates.

Right, which is why it was crucial to have such trials a year ago. We could have shipped vaccines 3 months sooner and saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

Unfortunately, no health authority was willing to risk blame for any disabilities or deaths stemming from deliberately exposing consenting people to covid. So we had to use much larger sample sizes and wait longer to know which vaccine candidates were effective.

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