US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

I would also not dismiss the nagging feeling in the back of your head that something doesn’t feel right. You know your body more than anyone.

Your first class may not teach this, but you'd get to it eventually if you kept taking classes. (Then again, your first class may at least mention this sort of thing at some point.) What the "average human" is is not what all humans are. There's all sorts of things like, the stuff in that link, major nerve clusters having additional or missing separations, extra separated or fused bones, major veins and arteries not being quite in the usual location... look close enough and you'll find something on everybody that doesn't match the "standard human anatomy".

Indeed, that's a critical question to the long term success of the strategy.

If the world is unable to put 8 billion people in solitary confinement (nevermind the disastrous effects that would cause) indefinitely until the virus is eliminated (nevermind the fact that we are incapabale of validating if it was actually completely erradicated), the virus is only going to pop back up.

There is no evidence of such a strategy working at scale across the world.

The scientists on the covid team at the WHO have said as much: lockdowns should only be used as a last resort to buy time to scale up health care resources. Should we listen to those scientists?

The so called long-term effects have been mostly non-existent with any vaccine. First of all, the very expression "long-term effects" is vague. Do we mean effects that only materialize over the long term (i.e. a long time after being administered) or effects that last for a long time? The latter can be known (well, with a worst case estimation) even with short testing.

And as far as I am aware, there is very little evidence of the former happening with former vaccines. I.e. the vaccine inducing some systemic change in your body that remains undetectable for years.

> If they truly believed these were safe and of tremendously important benefit, they could stand > up and say "we accept responsibility for negative outcomes in accordance with > ordinarily approved medication, and waive our rights to emergency use protections".

First of all who? You seem to mingle several groups into one here. It's not the pharma companies who believe that that these are very important, but the society. (Well, at least the ones who don't live in denial.) The importance stems from the seriousness of the epidemic.

And safety is not a binary/boolean attribute. Safety can be measured and the accuracy of the measurement has a confidence (i.e. a probability that it's within the estimated limits). Now the claim is that this measured safety is way above the safety of contracting COVID. And this is the very reason we know that it's beneficial. For the society. It's pretty clear that pharma companies don't make nearly as much profit as much it is beneficial for the individual countries. Just try to add up the cost of the lockdowns e.g. for a year and then devide it by the number of doses and see how much they should cost if calculated like that. You know what, let me do the math for you: a year of lockdown has been estimated to cost 251bn GBP for the UK[1]. The UK has 66M population. Let's calculate with 266M doses. That would give you 19GBP/dose (~26USD) for the vaccines per dose. Per year. But they won't vaccinate everyone, 80% would already be an over estimation (which would increase the value of price/dose to 32.5GBP and we're not just talking about money we're also talking about lost lives and a lot of frustration, which would further increase the value of these shots.

Comprared to that, the AstraZeneca costs about 2USD, IIRC, the EU pays about 16EUR (14GBP) for the Pfizer/Biontech one.

So it's not that the tremendous value gets all snatched up by the pharma companies. Also, they do have a responsibility. In the US they have been waived, but not in the EU. And guess what: a lot of people keeps saying the same things over here. (Including* that they don't take responsibility.)

The reason the US waived these companies is exactly because the vaccines are so important and valuable for the sate (i.e. for the people). A quick rollout was more important for them, than for the pharma companies. As a side note: some politicians over here (EU) think that the US did it the right way by not wasting time on negotiating hard with the pharma companies and that the EU is behind exactly because of that and that we should have waived them as well. (I'm not sure I buy into it.) But the EU non-waiver is an assurance for everyone else, including the US citizens. Yes, you may not get a million $ check if you happen to be unlucky, but it still shows that the companies indeed do have the confidence in their product you were talking about.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/mar/22/a-year-of-c...