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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

#931

Post by Alex3917 »

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…

> if this being in the news causes fewer people to get vaccinated, pausing it may be a mistake that will cause more overall deaths.

Except for that the government covering up the MMR investigation instead of doing it openly is what caused the anti-vaxx movement in the first place. Compare that with the public rallying around J&J after their Tylenol recall.

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

#932

Post by wincy »

cyberlurker wrote: post #783
wincy wrote: post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to the emergency room for earth shattering headaches (no history of headaches like this) after getting the J&J vaccine last week. I mentioned I’d got the vaccine and asked if it was possible the two were linked. The doctor did everything but actually roll his eyes and thought that the headache being caused by the vaccine was ridiculous. I bet if I went today he wouldn’t be so dismissive.

Would he somehow check for blood clots? What could that doctor have done?

He did order a CT scan on my head and neck. Luckily no stroke or anything like that.

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

#933

Post by kelnos »

dragontamer wrote: post #863
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.

> 6 obvious deaths that we're aware of. 1 death. The other cases are severe blood clotting but still alive by my understanding. That's literally one-in-6-million chance of death with regards to this blood-clotting issue. A vanishingly smaller chance than the 1-in-40,000 (or 150-in-6-million) a healthy young person has of dying of COVID19. So 1 death, 5 severe reactions related to blood clotting. Definitely a cause of…

It's not clear to me that the J&J vaccine's supply is large or critical enough that it's going to make that much of a difference (yet). If the supplies of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are such that most people with J&J appointments can just get one of the others instead, that's really not that big a deal.

Walk-ins might be affected, though, but I'm not sure what percentage of the total daily vaccinations are walk-ins vs. appointments.

And as a sibling mentions, the general risk of dying from COVID-19 is not 150 in 6M, because the probability of getting (symptomatic) COVID-19 needs to be factored into that figure. I would not be surprised that if that probability drops to under 1 in 6M after accounting for that, though of course the symptomatic infection risk differs based on demographics.

One thing that I am worried about, though, is that this might make people trust all the vaccines less in general. My girlfriend and I had J&J appointments for this Friday; fortunately we were able to get a walk-in Moderna shot today, but the issues with the J&J vaccine did give her a little anxiety even about the Moderna vaccine. I think that (and worse) might be pretty common, and isn't unreasonable.

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

#934

Post by robbiep »

fspeech wrote: post #920
robbiep wrote: post #899

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You mean, like 'ceteris paribus'?

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

#935

Post by kelnos »

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.

Well, consider that a lot of people who aren't applying as much caution to the virus itself just don't think it's that big a deal. Either they think their infection risk is low, or they expect they'll be asymptomatic, or think that even symptomatic infections aren't that bad. Through that lens, it makes sense to be wary of taking a vaccine with possibly-dangerous side effects when they don't believe the virus it protects against is all that bad.

I don't agree with the premise behind this reasoning, but I can see how it'd come about.

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

#936

Post by jrockway »

argvargc wrote: post #732
atleta wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you may not be (or see yourself) an anti-vaxxer, and your right that it's not necessarily wise to label everyone as such who have concerns with these vaccines, but it also doesn't mean that your excuses make sense. The batch is not "rushed" more than it's needed: there IS an emergency. It's also not experimental. The experiments have all been done (up to phase 3). It's perfectly normal to only see 1 in a millio…

Zero experiments have been done on long-term effects, and you cannot, and no one can, counter this point. That's the definition of "rushed". Vaccines typically take several years of testing before being approved. These aren't approved according to those standards. Manufacturers are absolved from risks because of this "emergency use" status. Why absolve them if there are no risks? If they truly believed these were saf…

Things are "rushed" because it's an emergency. SARS-CoV-2 has existed for a little more than a year, and it's already killed 3 million people. At some point, you have to take the leap of faith that this thing that's very much like other things is going to actually be very much like those other things. mRNA vaccines are not new. Adenovirus vaccines are not new. Vaccines are brought to market in less than a year routinely; consider the seasonal flu vaccine.

(Why are we seeing mRNA vaccines for COVID and not other diseases, if it's not new technology? Because the vaccines for other diseases didn't work.)

You are totally right that there could be some magical protein in the vaccines that causes you to drop dead in two years. There probably isn't though, so what you call "rushed" other people call "saving lives".

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

#937

Post by electrondood »

timr wrote: post #806
javagram wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Serious question, how many of those people would have died in the past 12 months if they didn't get COVID? The number is most likely not 500,000, but it also probably isn't 0. This can be answered using “excess mortality” data. Studies have shown during that time period, about 600,000 more people died than would have been expected compared to deaths in the previous year. The official covid death count is likely an…

> The official covid death count is likely an undercount of deaths caused by covid, because a number of people died from covid related complications and got recorded as pneumonia, Alzheimer’s, or heart disease/attack/stroke related deaths. That's a theory. Meanwhile, we know that many places are classifying anyone who dies within N days of a positive test (N is typically 30) as a "covid death", regardless of actual c…

I mean... there was a deadly global pandemic. It seems like you're just splitting hairs to discredit the fact that we're likely significantly undercounting COVID deaths.

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

#939

Post by Ericson2314 »

tobessebot wrote: post #307
Ericson2314 wrote: post #244

Well this seems stupid. The thing I'm trying to understand is whether Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca are meaningfully different. All the media just assumes they are (until proven equivalent), but is the genetic code publicly known so we can compare? The Pfizer and Moderna ones are extremely similar. Now, I imagine the adenovirus ones have an order of magnitude more genetic material, but is the code publicly know t…

J&J uses a very rare human adenovirus, AZ uses a more common chimpanzee adenovirus. J&J also has the so-called 2PP modification on the Spike protein compared with the AZ vaccine. Good writeup here: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/genetic-code-of-covid-19-v...

Thanks! I greatly enjoyed https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source... before, and somehow missed the same author had one on the adenovirus vaccines.

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

#940

Post by _rs »

disabled wrote: post #872
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…

It's not just a "blood clot" or some "rare type of blood clot". This was what I posted in this post about the European Medicines Agency acknowledging the AstraZeneca vaccine (which I was inoculated with) was linked to something never seen before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26725232 > "Zero surprises here. Both Norwegian and German research teams identified the /actual specific novel antibody/ that causes th…

Do you have any resources to read more about the research teams and their findings? Most of the articles I'm reading are very hand-wavy about the specifics/science and I'd love to actually learn more about the cause and condition.
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