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0 pointsravenstine5y ago0 comments

> What risks fueling anti-vaccine viewpoints is ignoring adverse impacts which are known and plowing forward, especially giveb that people often don’t have a choice of which vaccine they are administered.

Your point about other vaccines being available is totally valid and sound, but... what is our standard here, then? For absolute-zero people to die of any vaccine we produce? What if it was 1 person who got a blood clot? It probably sounds like I'm being pedantic, but I'm serious in that I want to know why people find it reasonable to pull an otherwise effective vaccine because of this. It just doesn't seem worth it to tell everyone that the vaccine is dangerous enough that it had to be pulled entirely.

Ignoring adverse impacts definitely fuels anti-vaccine sentiment, but so does giving people concrete evidence that the vaccine can possibly kill people, possibly leading them to be resistant to getting any COVID vaccine at all until they're forced to get it. I mean, if I were at all skeptical of getting a COVID vaccine, and I was told the J&J vaccine was so dangerous they had to pause it, why would I get any of the more experimental vaccines knowing that they also have the potential to kill me but we don't even know yet because they're experimental?

I don't think people on HN realize the full magnitude to which the public can be timid and irrational. It just doesn't seem worth it to me for us to possibly fuck up the rollout of vaccinations when we are facing a possible 4th wave of COVID and more virulent variants.

Let's compare some numbers here.

The number of known blood clot cases with the J&J vaccine seems to be 6 in 7 million. That's a ~0.00000085% chance of getting a blood clot caused by the vaccine, give or take a zero since I suck at math and calculators refuse to not use scientific notation. According to the CDC, around 100,000 people die of blood clots in the United States every year, and the US population is 308,401,808, meaning that Americans have a ~0.0003% chance of dying of a blood clot in their lifetime. The only concerning factor as far as I can tell is that the people who got the blood clots were women under 50.

I mean, fine, if that's a risk profile we are averse to, then so be it. I don't really understand that.

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mikem1705y ago

I agree with your numbers above. But wondered about factoring the below into these calculations [0]:

> During Johnson & Johnson's clinical trial, there were reports of other types of blood clots, too. Some are relatively common, such as deep vein thrombosis, so it wasn't surprising that among roughly 20,000 participants who received the vaccine, some would experience those clots.

> What made FDA scientists take note, however, is that in the trial, about the same number of people received a placebo -- a shot of saline that does nothing -- as received the vaccine. However, when comparing the two groups, more study participants developed clots after receiving the vaccine than the placebo.

> Calling it a "slight numerical imbalance," the FDA noted that there were 15 events in 14 participants who received the vaccine, compared to 10 events in 10 participants who received the placebo.

I think the 6 in 7 million people are the serious and unusual blood clots, but would not include the +50% increase in blood clots of any type noted above. However I appreciate that you did include the extra data about 100,000 people dying per blood clots per year.

I also like to pay attention to the numbers for this stuff. I was scheduled for a J&J shot today, which was cancelled. It wasn't my first vaccine choice. I'll be trying to get an appointment for one of the other vaccines, I guess.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/13/health/johnson-vaccine-blood-...

dragonwriter5y ago

> Your point about other vaccines being available is totally valid and sound, but... what is our standard here, then?

The standard is not to distribute a vaccine with a known side effect that standard treatment protocols will catastrophically fail for without pausing to get information about it to healthcare poviders needed to implement protocols to identify and properly treat it.

That’s explicitly what the pause is for per the article.

> The number of known blood clot cases with the J&J vaccine seems to be 6 in 7 million.

It’s not, because the effect is seen 6-13 days after vaccination, and much of the 7 million (per the article, 6.45 million is the most recent cumulative figure I can find elsewhere but its two days old, if both are accurate that's over 0.5 million doses in the last two days...) J&J doses that have been delivered are within 13 (and even 6) days. And the clots have all been in women 18-48, who aren't the only people getting the vaccine, so, unless that’s a fluke (and the numbers are small enough that that’s merely unlikely but not implausible) the prevalence in that demographic is even higher.

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