How many injections do you personally need to feel comfortable? Seven million people is way more than any clinical trial for any drug you've ever taken, and I guarantee you any of them is more likely to kill you.
Every single year 150 people die from taking Tylenol in the US in the normal course of treatment -- and 500 die of acute liver failure due to acetaminophen overdose. 25,000 hospital admissions. 50,000 ER visits. If we pretend that 350,000,000 people take Tylenol each year, that makes Tylenol 50% more likely to kill you than this vaccine.
It's simply not ok. They are anti-vaxxers.
We should be honest about the (low) risks and benefits of vaccination without turning it into a political campaign of shame and bullying, and trust people to make the right choice for them and the public.
Perhaps you also think the US government is anti-vaxxer, as it runs a publicly funded National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program - https://hrsa.gov/vaccine-compensation/index.html
Imagine if the FDA says "no big deal, low chance of it happening, keep going", then a week from now "oh seem like the rate has doubled, still low, keep going", then a week later "ok, if you have any risk of blood clots don't take the J&J vaccine". That scream "we didn't think this would happen".
You've just eroded trust in the system and the next time some weird side effects comes up you won't have to pause, people will just refuse to take it.
The government's response is to pacify anti-vaxxers.
I’m 25 and I’m relatively healthy. The risk that the disease kills me is significantly less than 1 in 100; it’s hard to find numbers but one chart had the hospitalization rate for me at 1%, and the death rate 0.01% (edit: though the death rate only covered age and didn’t divide by other factors such as obesity). The “chance” the vaccine kills you is currently zero as there have been no recorded deaths that have been linked to a COVID vaccine. The blood clotting risk has been cited as 1 in a million, but we’re working with limited data. This is the problem with making such extrapolations.
I write all of this as I’m on day 2 of dealing with the side effects of J&J.
It's 6 in 1000 if you listen to the CDC; personally I think the real number is closer to 3 in 1000. That's not too far off from what you said but I prefer being more explicit rather than using such a fuzzy resolution.
And just to be explicit, that's the general IFR, the IFR for, say, people in their 20's, or even people in their 40's, is a fraction of that.
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Anyway, your point about risk management is somewhat true, but it is much more true if you apply that logic to the general public's fear of SARS-2 in the first place. I can't find it in my notes but surveys that have asked people what their chance of dying is if they catch the virus, are off by MULTIPLE orders of magnitude. And young people rank their individual risk of death higher than old people do (both estimate too high, even the old people), presumably due to them being more "plugged in" to "the system" so to speak.
Personally speaking, since I'm in my 20's, almost everyone I know who has gotten the vaccine has done so because they believe outright falsehoods about the virus that have been propagated not just by the media but by our so-called health experts themselves.
For example, I have multiple friends who had PCR-confirmed COVID-19, recovered months ago, and still got the vaccine. In the times I've probed at them to see why, they muttered some vague things about "the variants" and essentially said that the variants bypass naturalistic immunity which is just completely false.
I know for a fact that my likelihood of an acute adverse reaction (the all-too-common "feeling like death for a day" reaction) is far higher than the likelihood of comparable symptoms from SARS-2 infection. So I'm not getting the vaccine, and I'm not embarrassed to say so. For many people, the risks of the virus are less than risks of the vaccine; however, much less people than you would think. We don't have good enough data yet but I'd bet it crosses over somewhere in the 40's or 50's age range.
There's a huge difference between being an "anti-vaxxer" in the true sense of the word - i.e. you think all vaccines are inherently bad, period - and being someone who takes the same attitude towards vaccines that we do towards drugs: no drug is inherently safe; rather drugs that are proven to be safe are safe. By extension, no vaccine is inherently safe; vaccines that are proven to be safe are safe.
The latter statement is my personal view of it, and unfortunately such a statement can get you banned from social media platforms if you get unlucky.
This binary way of dividing the world into "anti-vaxxer" vs not, "AIDS denialist" vs not, etc is not just oversimplified but is intentionally done to suppress dissent. I refuse to participate in such a culture and I humbly implore you to do so as well.
Again, the point is, when we observe adverse effect in the out-of-trial phase, it has hard to pin-point cause and effect. It is not a guarantee that the 7 million necessarily represent a random sample so proceeding with caution is warranted. We know, for example, vaccines have been distributed by age, and chances are, the 7 million is bias towards the older demographic.
> Every single year 150 people die from taking Tylenol in the US in the normal course of treatment -- and 500 die of acute liver failure due to acetaminophen overdose. 25,000 hospital admissions. 50,000 ER visits. If we pretend that 350,000,000 people take Tylenol each year, that makes Tylenol 50% more likely to kill you than this vaccine.
Again, the point isn't that {insert_your_favourite_drug} is 10x more likely to kill you - the point is, when we do not understand why something is happening, it is better to pause and detect whether there is a more fundamental issue. For example, suppose that every single injection that caused an adverse reaction was produced at the same facility and as part of the same batch - we would definitely be better off in investigating the root cause than to leave it be. Until we fully understand what mechanism is causing this adverse effect and how to best counteract it, in my opinion, a pause is warranted.
My point is that yes, an investigation should be carried out, but stopping the trial obviously - trivially - does more harm than good due to the extenuating circumstances of the global pandemic.
