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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

#711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That seems like it'd be easy to fix: the government just needs to say "as soon as you're fully vaccinated, you don't need to social distance or wear a mask in public anymore". Since that isn't their position, there's basically zero incentive for young, healthy people to risk the vaccine side effects.

That runs contrary to good public health policy for C19 where even the fully vaccinated should follow many precautions such as masking in public and limiting number of households in close contact.

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

#712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government over-reactions to COVID19 have been disastrous. There would have been an economic hit for sure but things would have returned to near normal by August 2020 if they had respected freedom (or if people had disobeyed in mass).

> returned to near normal by August 2020 The problem is the virus, not the government reaction to it. Personally, I tend to think governments under-reacted in most Western countries. I'm not sure how things would have returned to "normal" if the virus was raging out of control. A good precentage of people would see the deaths and still avoid going out to shop or whatever. I'm assuming you mean by "normal" that people…

> A good precentage of people would see the deaths and still avoid going out to shop or whatever.

That seems hard to believe, since significantly more people die every year of all causes than could possibly have died of Covid, even if every single person in the world caught it. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed anything was different.

> even if 10 or 20% of people changed their behavior that would still impact the economy.

Maybe so, but the economy is not the only or even the most important casualty of our Covid response. The importance of human social gatherings, the freedom to leave one’s home and go wherever one pleases, the education of children, and so on cannot be measured in economic terms.

> The problem is the virus, not the government reaction to it.

Places where there were very few or only brief restrictions, like Serbia, Belarus, or Florida, largely avoided the issues I described above with only a small or in some cases unmeasurable increase in all cause mortality for 2020.

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

#713
post #711

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like it'd be easy to fix: the government just needs to say "as soon as you're fully vaccinated, you don't need to social distance or wear a mask in public anymore". Since that isn't their position, there's basically zero incentive for young, healthy people to risk the vaccine side effects.

That runs contrary to good public health policy for C19 where even the fully vaccinated should follow many precautions such as masking in public and limiting number of households in close contact.

If you believe good public health policy requires that there be restrictions on gatherings even where everyone is fully vaccinated, then what do you see as the path back to full normality? Or is this just how humanity has to live forever now?

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

#714

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly sure what procreation has to do with anything. Also pretty sure risk of death outweighs literally any possible long-tail risk, so still seems sensible for the young to get the vax. Also don't think the long-tail risk of an mRNA vaccine can be worse then COVID's long-tail risk.

Total COVID deaths for people aged 0-17 in the USA are 246 so far. That's not that many. Despite my wife and I getting vaccinated, I'm not completely sure what the correct answer is for our kids. To put those numbers into perspective, more kids die from the flu in any given year (despite vaccination!). And far more kids die from car related accidents, and cars are a daily fact of life here. I'm also interested in the…

Here are some more relative risk assessments as well as stronger statistics when you're comparing to deaths by COVID-19:

A college-enrolled 18-24 year old is 3.67x more likely to die of suicide [1][2][3].

A college-enrolled 18-24 year old is 6.08x more likely to die of alcohol [3][4].

A child (0-14 years) is 6.75x more likely to die by motor vehicles [5].

A child (0-14 years) is 3.93x more likely to die of drowning in a pool [6].

All fatalities are compared to present CDC numbers [7].

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3809451/

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enroll...

[3] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d18/tables/dt18_302.60.a...

[4] https://www.niaaa.nih.gov/publications/brochures-and-fact-sh...

[5] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...

[6] https://www.cdc.gov/homeandrecreationalsafety/water-safety/w...

[7] https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/Provisional-COVID-19-Death-Counts-...

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

#715

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.

I think part of the thing that makes this more difficult is that some people already have practically no risk of suffering health consequences from COVID-19, and possibly (but also possibly not) do risk suffering health consequences from the vaccination.

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

#716
post #695

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The background rate you quoted are expected to be spread out independent of vaccination. If you pick a two-week window after vaccination you should only expect 1/6 of the cases that are expected in 3 month, which is the number you calculated.

But we're not observing people for 3 months and picking an arbitrary two week window. People do not get added to the population until they have taken the vaccine, and they are all observed for different lengths of time. We did not hypothesize a 2 week period beforehand and compare how many landed within to how many were outside that range, the 2 weeks is just a circle drawn around the datapoints after the fact.

Here is the chain of logic:

1. First assume independence, that CVST is unrelated to vaccination.

2. Take any two weeks, you can calculate the expected cases using population background rate because we assume independence.

3. The number is around 1 using Wikipedia data.

4. The observed case number 6 greatly exceeds the expected number based on independence assumption.

5. We conclude that with high probability that our independence assumption is wrong, i.e. there's correlation with high confidence.

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

#717

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'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 cha…

Hey thanks for this. I have the sources next to each. Just click the link in the bottom left corner. Let me know if you don't think they're accurate after having a look.

I took the driving risk as being 250 miles of driving with an average 50mph speed (The risk of dying must be higher at high speed so wanted to take a high average to be fair).

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

#718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey. What will that mean exactly? DNS is through Cloudflare using their magical CNAME pointer. Can you access OK?

I see IPv4 A records. I am guessing what's happening is that when you look up the DNS over IPv6, it gives you AAAA records instead of A records. Or, it can depend on locality. Cloudflare is not a DNS provider that gives the same answer to everyone -- its goal is to direct traffic to the cache that's closest to the end user. Edit: I looked into it more and I can get IPv6 and IPv4 DNS servers to serve me both A and AAA…

Thanks for checking. Much appreciated.

Yeah I banked too much on Cloudflare... I've ramped up its dyno a bit now too. Hopefully that'll keep it up!

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

#719
post #699

John Campbell suggested on his video the other day that perhaps this is happening because some injectors are not aspirating. What that means is that when an intramuscular injection is given you want to ensure that it goes into the muscle and not into a vein. So the proper way to do this is for the person doing the injection to first pull out the syringe (after it's been stuck into the arm) a bit to make sure there's…

Injecting IM solution into a blood vessel is excruciating and you and the provider would notice it immediately if it happened. It is likely to cause an embolism and possibly kill you, but I don't think it would be unnoticeable and then cause a thrombus multiple days later. There are also not a lot of major vessels near common injection sites, for this reason. It's possible and rather common to nick a surface capillar…

hah, I inject myself with estrogen subcutaneously. it gets absorbed quicker which causes peaks and troughs, but I get to use a smaller needle (25g x 5/8") and I don't have to worry so much about bruising or locating the right sites.

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

#720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly sure what procreation has to do with anything. Also pretty sure risk of death outweighs literally any possible long-tail risk, so still seems sensible for the young to get the vax. Also don't think the long-tail risk of an mRNA vaccine can be worse then COVID's long-tail risk.

Total COVID deaths for people aged 0-17 in the USA are 246 so far. That's not that many. Despite my wife and I getting vaccinated, I'm not completely sure what the correct answer is for our kids. To put those numbers into perspective, more kids die from the flu in any given year (despite vaccination!). And far more kids die from car related accidents, and cars are a daily fact of life here. I'm also interested in the…

It is a clear cut answer if you understand what an mRNA vaccine is.
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