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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

#911

Post by diebeforei485 »

js2 wrote: post #702

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 unders…

The 6 are only those we know of. There could be others, because these cerebral blood clots can happen two weeks after receiving the vaccine.

As we analyze the data, and see if more data comes in the next two weeks, we'll have a better sense of the risk.

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

#912

Post by jussij »

titzer wrote: post #750
tacitusarc wrote: post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6 obvious deaths that we're aware of. The risk of the vaccines is in their novelty and morbidity. An abundance of caution is required in this instance. It would be very bad to discover that there's a vanishingly small chance of blood clots within the first 3 months but a significant chance when paired with other events over the following decade.

I wish people applied this much caution to the virus. Who knows what cancers it causes 10 years down the road.

There is already plenty of evidence some people who survive the virus end up with lasting lung damage.

While this is not cancer, for those poor souls, a lifetime spent struggling to breathe is not much better.

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

#913

Post by jopsen »

kmlx wrote: post #900
jopsen wrote: post #885

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(A) vaccination means less social distancing sooner. Lots of people are interested that. (B) covid-19 might very well become endemic. Like how the common cold is always around. It's not so bad if we're vaccinated. But for those that don't get vaccinated hurd immunity might not cover them. In practice: I think we just need to be honest about the risk of vaccines. And say that taking it is the patriotic thing to do :)

> vaccination means less social distancing sooner. i guess you can put it like that. from my understanding the vaccines do reduce the transmissibility of the virus, but they do not lower it to zero [0]. you can still get the virus, but with the vaccine your chances of needing hospitalisation drop to zero [1]. i guess this is why you still need to wear a mask, and still need to socially distance even if you are vaccin…

> from my understanding the vaccines do reduce the transmissibility of the virus

Yeah, but once vaccinated you can start to worry less. And surely we'll see things open up to those who are vaccinated.

The fact that it's possibly still transmissible by vaccinated people is probably the reason why we all need to get vaccinated, and there is no hurd immunity to be gained :/

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

#914

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

loveistheanswer wrote: post #901
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The ideal strategy without hindsight was conventional wisdom: Protect the vulnerable and stiff upper lip for the rest. China, Vietnam, Australia and New Zealand used strict lockdowns to eliminate community spread, and then largely opened things up again. People in those countries have been able to live much more normal lives than people elsewhere during the pandemic. With hindsight, that was clearly the correct str…

2/4 of those examples are affluent island nations with low population densities. Another one of those examples has been actively censoring covid information from the start, and thus cannot be trusted. As for Vietnam, it is an interesting case, and we don't have enough data to rule out cross reactivity or other factors playing a role. Extrapolating these data points to the entire world with wildly varying sociological…

> 2/4 of those examples are affluent island nations with low population densities.

Australia and NZ have densely populated cities, and what does being an island have to do with anything? Countries can close their borders. In fact, Australian states closed their borders to one another.

> Another one of those examples has been actively censoring covid information from the start, and thus cannot be trusted.

You don't have to trust the government. Just ask people you know in China what's going on there. Things have been mostly open for a year now, with no sign of the virus (outside of a few localized outbreaks, which have been dealt with through local lockdowns and blanket testing of the population). China is not the black box that many people think it is.

> As for Vietnam, it is an interesting case, and we don't have enough data to rule out cross reactivity or other factors playing a role.

Vietnamese people are not somehow immune to SARS-CoV-2. They're susceptible, just like everyone else.

> Extrapolating these data points to the entire world

This is the wrong way to think about this. These aren't data points generated by some semi-random process. They're countries that effectively implemented a strategy that we know should work, based on the basic principles of epidemiology. The virus is spread between people who are in close proximity to one another. If you drastically reduce contacts between people, the virus has far fewer chances to spread, and the epidemic recedes. If you do that long enough, you get down to a small enough number of cases that you can trace every single one and snuff out the virus completely. After that, you have to have strict measures at the border in order to catch imported cases, and you have to do regular testing in the population to make sure you don't miss the beginnings of any new outbreak.

There's nothing to "extrapolate." The strategy works because of very basic principles of how the virus spreads. The only question is whether each county has the organizational capacity and societal will to carry this strategy out.

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

#915

Post by kaitai »

School-Cotton wrote: post #712
UncleOxidant wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 impa…

It's not at all hard to believe. All the people in my family, for instance, have changed grocery habits and stopped discretionary shopping in stores essentially entirely. Why? Many are older and have risks yet also have full lives and want to live to play with their grandkids. We prioritized gathering with each other cautiously over spending money shopping and changed habits immediately (I started working from home March 12, before any US guidance).

Sweden is an interesting example. Comparing Sweden and Finland, for instance, older people essentially cloistered themselves in Sweden because they had no trust that they'd be safe in society, and their spending dropped by a higher amount than old people in Finland, who changed their habits less due to the swift and more stringent government response? My old-person family members in Finland were able to keep shopping, going to church, and having birthday parties with many families due to that response (as opposed to in the US where we limited ourselves to gatherings with max 3 households and did everything masked or outdoors due to several people still working on site).

Perhaps you live in a very different place. You certainly interpret statistics quite differently given your example of Florida.

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

#916

Post by kaitai »

hedora wrote: post #310
captainredbeard wrote: post #224

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).

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…

As someone with a family member working in a hospital who still couldn't get reliable PPE after 3 months, I feel that you live in an entirely different universe than I do. Would that we would have lived in a country where PPE for nurses, physicians, and hospital workers were prioritized in summer 2020. Hah. Hospitals were not in a position to get their own; I saw them jockeying for shipments from China and Korea and it's just ludicrous to expect people to get their PPE in bidding wars that involve calling in favors from the chief cardiologist's wife's uncle who owns a factory in China.

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

#917

Post by robbiep »

hnick wrote: post #907
da_big_ghey wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you are having conflate for deaths from each of things. Rates in dying are not homogeneous in J&J vax versus corona. J&J vax maybe is received by many younglings who are not risking death so much from Corona for benefit of old. It is not yet being known for if J&J vax is having any greater risk for older people or younger people. So calculus is maybe not so simple. If I are healthy young person maybe it is not a…

Also if you live somewhere like Australia or NZ which is vaccinating but has largely wiped out community COVID. It makes sense to have a bit more caution in such places as long as the mRNA vaccine can still be used. Australia suspended the AstraZeneca vaccine for that reason, but I believe we're using it again now after some analysis.

It's been continued with adequate consultation. I was supposed to have my AZ this morning (however had to postpone) as part of the 1b category. 35 yo male. I'm ok with getting it but i would kind of like the pfizer one coz i'm a nerd and the pfizer vaccine has more science in it.

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

#918

Post by ebruchez »

dheera wrote: post #736
js2 wrote: post #702

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 unders…

Why is everyone worried about blood clots, and not that the J&J vaccine has a crap-tastic efficiency of 66.3%? Would you want the chef at your local takeout to be vaccinated to 66.3% efficiency? or 94%? Why was this vaccine even approved, instead of just having J&J produce the same vaccine Pfizer and Moderna are making, which would be in the best interest of the world? Is this some utterly idiotic capitalism bullshit…

> Why is everyone worried about blood clots, and not that the J&J vaccine has a crap-tastic efficiency of 66.3%?

See "Why you can't compare Covid-19 vaccines":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3odScka55A

You're welcome.

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

#919

Post by mhb »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #886
TrevorJ wrote: post #855

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had wondered about this as well - in the pool of people who have gotten the J&J vaccine, how many would we expect to have developed a blood clot under normal circumstances anyway?

That's exactly what they'll be studying to see if it's statistically relevant. They're being super cautious. Some would say over cautious but I think it's fine since J&J is currently only 5-10% of the vaccine supply going out. Which means a slight slow down in vaccine supply but not as big a deal as AZ in Europe since that is their main supply.

A slight slow down is a euphemism for people dying. Maybe it's the right decision, but it's disingenuous not to say it in those terms.

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

#920

Post by fspeech »

robbiep wrote: post #899
haswell wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the risk of dying from the vaccine for young women was higher than the risk of dying from the virus Do you have a good source you'd recommend for this? I couldn't find this bit of info from the first few articles I skimmed. > After the concerns about AZ turned out to be justified and AZ being banned for certain age groups you'd think that people would get a clue about unconditional vaccine cheerleading. Who is unco…

In australia for example, where there is currently zero community transmission, and AZ was the preferred rollout for most of the population, assuming only women are vulnerable (not true) about 8m women below 50 (the age for which the government instituted the cutoff for alternatives) so at 1:500,000 risk of some injury (edit - originally said death) that’s 16 people who, ceteris paribus, wouldn’t be at any risk

I think your argument can be better if you qualify your assessment of risk for Australian women with the temporal constraint of "for now". Because transmission is low in Australia they may be better off waiting for a safer choice. However eventually travel will return and it is highly likely that the virus will still be around.
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