You're right that 7 / 7,000,000 are good odds, and most people would likely take them - but it would be unwise to not give people an educated choice between vaccines if there are known risks.
They are not giving people an educated choice, they are taking that choice away until they deem it okay to give it back. Education is knowing that 7/7,000,000 had a blood clot + the other tests that were done leading up to its release. We know that now. We're educated.
The CVST incidents give a lower bound on risk. The trial data give a rough upper bound on risk (rough due to the small sample size). Knowledge is being refined here. We can't make educated choices without knowledge.
Hard to give people an educated choice without looking into the issue first. Once they know what is going on it will most likely be back to normal. There was a similar issue in Europe, but that neatly overlapped with a delivery shortage of the affected vaccine.
We should give people an educated choice. With unknown side effects we are not doing that. Thank you for pointing that out.
Make sure you cover every possible thing, no matter how unlikely.
not really. that's not how statistics work. it could grow, it could shrink.
> All six cases were in women aged between 18 and 48, with symptoms appearing six to 13 days after vaccination.
Presumably, some of the 7 million people who have gotten the vaccine did so in the prior 5-12 days. It is reasonable to expect to see more cases over the next 6-13 days from the moment we pause J&J vaccination.
And for anyone that thinks this is just normal incidence of blood clots being blamed on the vaccine - that's what was said about AstraZeneca originally, and if these clots are anything like those it is absolutely not the case. Those are serious clots that are very rare to see period, let alone in young people, and require different treatment than normal clots (they have surprisingly low platelet count).
I suspect US agencies had good reason to want to pause J&J given all of that - the AZ vaccine issues were also disproportionately affecting women interestingly.
I suspect that, as soon as we start looking for blood clotting post-vaccine, then you'll find more cases that may have not been caught otherwise due to their not being severe enough to be noticed.
https://twitter.com/HamidMerchant/status/1381797044495466504
If that is the case we could then target this vaccine to the rest and have it be much safer while giving out the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines to this group.
End result is everyone still getting their vaccine fast but less side effects (and possibly deaths due to worst case side effects). This is why we need more data or the time to study the data in this case most likely
Don't know if it matters to anyone, but the "FDA has suggested that health care providers pause the use of the vaccine while the side effects are being studied. However, providers are not prohibited from using the vaccine if they feel the benefits to an individual patient outweigh the risks." [1]
1. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/04/13/9867670...
