US agencies call for pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine

The risk of dying from a blood clot after receiving the J&amp;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&amp;J vaccine tomorrow, and if it is the cause of the clots, then 6,971 people would die from the vaccine.<p>Yesterday, Covid19 killed 8,803 people (according to worldometers).<p>We don&#x27;t want anyone to die from vaccination, and we don&#x27;t fully understand what the clotting issue is, so it probably makes sense to pause using J&amp;J as long as the mRNA vaccines (Pfizer, Moderna) have not been implicated (which they haven&#x27;t). OTOH, if this being in the news causes fewer people to get vaccinated, pausing it may be a mistake that will cause more overall deaths.<p>Now, your risk of dying either from vaccination or Covid19 depends on various demographic factors not accounted for in my math above. But, nonetheless, the risk of dying from the J&amp;J vaccine is really, really, really tiny.<p>Like, if I knew there was a 0.00009% chance my car were going to explode every time I got in it and started it, I would not be at all nervous about starting my car everyday for the rest of my life. I&#x27;m way more likely, even accounting for my age demographic, to choke to death eating dinner tonight (5,051 deaths from choking in the U.S. in 2015 of which 2,848 were older than 74).<p>Edit: lifetime risk of car exploding assuming I start it every day for 50 years is about 1.6%. Okay, maybe I wouldn&#x27;t play that game.

&quot;The incidence of cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) varies between studies, but it is estimated to be between 2 and 5 per million per year. A recent study in the Netherlands with comprehensive ascertainment suggested a much higher incidence.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ahajournals.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1161&#x2F;STROKEAHA.116.013617" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ahajournals.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1161&#x2F;STROKEAHA.116.0...</a><p>So the six reported cases in 6.8 million vaccinations seems low. Glad I read about all this because I got the J&amp;J vaccine 12 days ago. No noticeable side effects so far. I exercise a lot and did a 5 mile hike four days ago that resulted in a slightly strained a calf muscle. I have been taking it easy the past few days, meaning sitting and reading a lot more than usual. So after learning about the blood clotting, have started exercising the legs frequently. My optimistic thinking is that even if the vaccine does cause an increased risk of CVST that risk can be eliminated via exercise.<p>It will be most interesting to learn if those six cases involved people at high risk, if they exercise regularly, etc.

John Campbell suggested on his video the other day that perhaps this is happening because some injectors are not aspirating. What that means is that when an intramuscular injection is given you want to ensure that it goes into the muscle and not into a vein. So the proper way to do this is for the person doing the injection to first pull out the syringe (after it&#x27;s been stuck into the arm) a bit to make sure there&#x27;s no blood coming out. Then if not, the vaccine is pushed in. If blood is seen then a new site has to be chosen. Apparently Denmark has included aspiration in their directions for usage of the AZ vaccine.

So this past year the government has been willing to let unemployment, suicides and drug overdoses jump due to isolation and loneliness caused by lockdowns, child abuse to skyrocket and mental health to plumment due to schools being kept closed, all because we needed to stop covid at any cost. Now one person dies out of almost 7 million who received the vaccine, and we need to stop administering the J&amp;J vaccine &quot;out of an abundance of caution&quot;? I&#x27;m starting to think more and more that the shitty decisions regarding covid in the past year were because it was an election year.

6 cases in 7 million doses over 3 months is exactly the rate that CVST would normally be expected at. While that doesn&#x27;t mean we shouldn&#x27;t investigate, it does mean there is no reason to be alarmed at this time.<p>&gt; Cerebral venous sinus thrombosis is rare, with an estimated 3-4 cases per million annual incidence in adults. While it may occur in all age groups, it is most common in the third decade. 75% are female. [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cerebral_venous_sinus_thrombosis#:~:text=Low%20molecular%20weight%20heparin,of%20the%20body%2C%20and%20seizures" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cerebral_venous_sinus_thrombos...</a>.

For AstraZeneca and not J&amp;J, but these slides from the University of Cambridge do a better job of communicating the balance of risks than I possibly could: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.publishing.service.gov.uk&#x2F;government&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;system&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;attachment_data&#x2F;file&#x2F;976877&#x2F;CovidStats_07-04-21-final.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;assets.publishing.service.gov.uk&#x2F;government&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;...</a>

Both the AstraZeneca and J&amp;J vaccines use an adenovirus to deliver DNA instead of mRNA wrapped in lipid (like Moderna &amp; Pfizer).<p>Everywhere I read about the J&amp;J vaccine, I see something like &quot;the DNA vaccine doesn&#x27;t alter your DNA&quot;. Can somebody please clear this up?<p>As far as I understand, the mRNA just stays in the cytoplasm of the cell and gets used up by the ribosome to create spike proteins. The adenovirus vector used in the J&amp;J (and other vaccines) injects DNA in the cell&#x27;s nucleus, which seems at odds with the widely circulated &quot;it doesn&#x27;t change your DNA&quot; statement.<p>Do people make this claim because the cell displaying spike proteins is basically always eliminated by CD8 killer T cells?<p>Btw here&#x27;s a nice high-level summary by the NYT about how all the vaccines work: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2021&#x2F;health&#x2F;how-covid-19-vaccines-work.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2021&#x2F;health&#x2F;how-covid-19...</a>

Why didn&#x27;t they stop the vaccinations in women under age of 60&#x2F;65?<p>I&#x27;m a 40 year old man, if I were a woman I wouldn&#x27;t take J&amp;J or AstraZeneca, but as I&#x27;m a man, I think it&#x27;s worth to take the risk of the side effects of the vaccination.

Relevant tweet: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;robertwiblin&#x2F;status&#x2F;1381967753234411530" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;robertwiblin&#x2F;status&#x2F;1381967753234411530</a><p>J&amp;J doses delivered: 7 million.<p>Reported blood clotting events: 6.<p>Daily risk of dying of COVID19 in the US: 1 in 330,000.<p>CDC and FDA: Pause the J&amp;J vaccine.<p>Draw your own conclusion on how aligned these folks are with your interests.

Okay so I want to make something very clear here. The rule is to put it very very simply, is you can ship any drug that is approved but you have to list the side effects. This drug was approved under an emergency order and this side effect was not listed. This will get paused long enough for the side effects to be updated and then used again. The arguments about “well the birth control pill has a higher risk” are using a fact that while it is true, is not relevant as that data has no relationship to the rules that have to be followed. The valid argument would be, those that issue the emergence order for use to should amend the order to acknowledge the issue but not block use immediately.

The 9 day median length to development of the condition leads me to believe that this number will grow, and that they are smart to pause for a week or two to see what the real numbers are.

Meta-comment: The ratio of downvoting to discussion in here is rather worrisome. The current top thread isn&#x27;t really even about COVID vaccines; it&#x27;s primarily an argument of the &quot;this isn&#x27;t an argument, this is contradiction&quot; variety about birth control, of all things.<p>It should be possible to have a mature, good-faith conversation about this, even on a pseudonymous web forum.

7 people out of 7 million dose&#x27;s. That&#x27;s why they stopped. My wife and I got the J&amp;J shot on Saturday so I&#x27;m directly at risk and I&#x27;d take it everytime even if the risk was 10 times what it currently is. I&#x27;ve already seen a bunch of anit-vaxers referring to this in new articles this morning. So let&#x27;s see, 1 in a million chance that the vaccine will make you sick (only 1 person has died so far, which is terrible but it&#x27;s 1 out of 7 million) vs a worldwide pandemic that has killed millions. All these anti-vaxers talking about living in fear of a virus that has 98% survival rate are AFRAID of a vaccine that has a 99.999998% ( 7&#x2F;7,000,000 == 0.000001) survival rate, oh and is 100% effective at stopping you from dying. Literally no one that has received the vaccine has died from COVID19. The fact that modern society can be SO smart some times and yet so incredibly idiotic is so frustrating to me.

Here&#x27;s a question for someone smarter than me. Is there a chance that this number (six cases in seven million doses) will rise as regulators comb through previous reports of adverse effects?

6 cases doesn&#x27;t seem high enough to rise above the baseline incidence rate that I would expect for a population of millions that have received the vaccine.<p>The reported data simply doesn&#x27;t explain stopping use of this vaccine. It seems like either:<p>1) They are overreacting based on sparse data, which will cast doubt on the validity of their actions.<p>2) There is information being withheld that implicates, though perhaps without certainty, that the vaccine is the specific cause of these issues.<p>Either way, the net result will be more distrust &amp; greater reluctance to get vaccinated. There has to be a better way to handle this problem.

&gt; The US has by far the most confirmed cases of Covid-19 - more than 31 million - with more than 562,000 deaths, another world high.<p>The BBC is usually pretty good about sticking to relevant information (at least compared to US media), so I was a bit disappointed to see this blurb - especially since it&#x27;s only the fourth sentence in the article. What does it add? It has nothing to do with the subject (ie the safety of the J&amp;J vaccine) and isn&#x27;t even particularly useful data in almost any other context aside from half-baked political jabs between nations.

The section I have italicized here stood out in the statement from the FDA&#x2F;CDC, in my opinion. This is not about putting vaccinations with the Johnson &amp; Johnson vaccine on hold <i>infinitely</i>. For a good part, it seems to be about being <i>aware of and prepared for</i> this serious adverse effect, not to avoid it at all costs.<p>&quot;Until that process is complete, we are recommending a pause in the use of this vaccine out of an abundance of caution. <i>This is important, in part, to ensure that the health care provider community is aware of the potential for these adverse events and can plan for proper recognition and management due to the unique treatment required with this type of blood clot.</i>&quot;, from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;media&#x2F;releases&#x2F;2021&#x2F;s0413-JJ-vaccine.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;media&#x2F;releases&#x2F;2021&#x2F;s0413-JJ-vaccine.htm...</a>

Well this seems stupid.<p>The thing I&#x27;m trying to understand is whether Johnson &amp; 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 to compare?<p>As far as I can tell, they both should have been approved ages ago, if only to depress prices and get more redundancy.

It&#x27;s interesting to me seeing the direct data-based reactions to the pause on the J&amp;J vaccine. For example, Nate Silver of 538 wrote (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;NateSilver538&#x2F;status&#x2F;1381925025964515330" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;NateSilver538&#x2F;status&#x2F;1381925025964515330</a>):<p>&gt; 6 cases out of 7 million people. What a disaster. This is going to get people killed. And it&#x27;s going to create more vaccine hesitancy. These people don&#x27;t understand cost-benefit analysis. They keep making mistakes by orders of magnitude.<p>I am seeing this argument from people of all political views this morning, but I am most surprised to see it from the political left. Why isn&#x27;t the same data-driven approach used when we&#x27;re talking about policing, or gun violence, or traffic deaths? In all these cases, the frequency of negative outcomes (policing deaths of unarmed black people, homicides committed with guns, traffic fatalities per mile traveled) is very low and when weighed with the positive outcomes, it is clear that people are acting irrationally when they try to defund police, or ban firearms, or restrict driving. And yet, the data is never brought up so directly in those conversations by either everyday people or news media.<p>The J&amp;J vaccine issue is frankly less alarming to me than this open hypocrisy or disconnect in our societal discourse.

Interesting to find out if this is again correlated to blood type. Type O has a lower risk of clots from COVID in general, thought to be related to the amount of von Willebrand factor in the blood:<p>&quot;...since the ACE2 receptor belongs to the renin-angiotensin system (it regulates blood pressure), the virus cannot but affect the blood vessels. Apparently, it is capable of causing local inflammation of the walls of blood vessels and capillaries. This results in an increased release of VWF into the blood, which, in turn, provokes clotting.&quot; [0]<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.news-medical.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;20200706&#x2F;COVID-19-complications-may-be-associated-with-von-Willebrand-factor-in-the-blood.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.news-medical.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;20200706&#x2F;COVID-19-complica...</a>

I see a lot of arguments that are basically &quot;people are too stupid to understand risk&quot;. That, in turn, comes from the fact that the FDA&#x2F;CDC&#x2F;NIH has not covered itself in Glory the last many years. Covid just uncovered the rot, while Trump danced around it, and poured gasoline on the fire.<p>The best thing to get people to understand risk is to actually follow the process in the EUA. Pause, evaluate the outcomes, change the labels and dosing. Which this does.<p>At the same time, the FDA&#x2F;CDC need to start taking other countries data into account. At this point, there is no excuse not to be using a UK style &quot;first dose first&quot; strategy, especially if mRNA is all we have for a while.

Given COVID prevalence in my state (approx 1 out of 10,000 people test positive each day, so assume 20 out of 10,000 are infectious at the moment), and the IFR for those under 50 of about 0.01% (1 out of 10,000 coincidentally), I would have to come into close contact with 20 people over the time from when I could get the J&amp;J shot to when I could get Pfizer or Moderna.<p>That&#x27;s not anti-vax denialism, those are the actual numbers. A one in a million risk isn&#x27;t a good deal for the individual when case rates and IFR are low.<p>This would be a good deal if you were in Michigan, or if you were over 65.

It&#x27;s a very interesting dilemma indeed. Obviously, if it&#x27;s 7 out of 7 millions, then pausing it for the duration of the investigation does <i>way more</i> harm than good, given how many infections happen these days.<p>On the other hand this extra cautiousness shows how robust the safety of the system is: even minor glitches get caught and examined which practically pretty much rules out that there are side effects of orders of magnitudes more likely that we don&#x27;t realize. And that may indeed worth it overall. Though in practice it would still make more sense if they continued until it reached a higher threshold (<i>if</i> it is ever to reach it).<p>Unfortunately, while this should be seen as very reassuring WRT the safety and the level of trust we can have in the vaccines, fear is irrational and for some people it proves that the vaccines are <i>not</i> safe.<p>E.g. here in Hungary, we have the EMA licensed vaccines (same as the FDA licensed ones) and also a Chinese (Sinopharm) and a Russian (Sputnik-V), with a permission from the Hungarian authorities. Now when the blood clotting issue emerged with AstraZeneca, some started to say &quot;see, that&#x27;s how much the EMA license is worth. BUT the Sputnik-V is good because you never heard about such issues with it&quot;. Which is, needless to say, completely upside down. (Not suggesting that the Sputnik does have the same problem, though I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised, since it&#x27;s the same technology as the AZ and the J&amp;J. Also, I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if <i>all</i> vaccines had the same issue as the virus itself causes clotting.)

The online argument about this is raging about whether this is a stupid decision and I’d like to side step that well-trodden path of vitriol to ask more broadly: what’s the deal with Covid and blood clotting?<p>I know personally a long hauler who has blood clotting issues and low platelets. They fall into the demographic of concern with the JJ and AZ vaccine. Anecdotally we have lost both a close relative and a young and healthy friend to Covid blood clotting related issues.<p>Again, I’m not weighing in on the FDA’s job. But just saying: as someone who’s anecdotally been hyper-aware of the blood related aspects of Covid, this thread has picked up my ears and I’m really interested in finding out what the linkage here is.

Related: The J&amp;J Vaccine Is Safer Than the Birth Control Millions of Women Take Every Day<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;article&#x2F;z3xbk9&#x2F;johnson-and-johnson-covid-vaccine-versus-birth-control-pill-blood-clots" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;article&#x2F;z3xbk9&#x2F;johnson-and-johnson-c...</a>

I think that simple news reporting inadvertently screws up how the general public perceives low-probability events.<p>Whether it&#x27;s an airplane crash or a blood clot caused by a vaccine, human minds simply can&#x27;t &#x27;feel&#x27; that a phenomenon is rare when it is repeated over and over again in their newsfeed.

Is there an understanding of why the vaccines cause the clots?

I haven&#x27;t seen any news articles provide a point of comparison of how the number of people receiving the J&amp;J vaccine and experiencing this particular kind of clotting. The first academic-ish article on the subject I could find indicated a typical baseline of 15.7 cases per million (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ahajournals.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1161&#x2F;STROKEAHA.116.013617" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ahajournals.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;full&#x2F;10.1161&#x2F;STROKEAHA.116.0...</a>). If that&#x27;s true, I don&#x27;t get it - why would we stop roll out of any vaccine when the baseline (15.7) is higher than the problem that is being claimed (1 per million)?

These vaccines have only got emergency approval . It is true that reliability of vaccines have caused some nervousness in society and that is obvious because no vaccine in history is out so early for use Must read <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.weforum.org&#x2F;agenda&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;vaccine-development-barriers-coronavirus&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.weforum.org&#x2F;agenda&#x2F;2020&#x2F;06&#x2F;vaccine-development-b...</a> Whole world is going through tough time. I hope suffering ends sooner than later

From the CDC, updated today...<p>&quot;Over 189 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through April 12, 2021. During this time, VAERS received 3,005 reports of death (0.00158%) among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;2019-ncov&#x2F;vaccines&#x2F;safety&#x2F;adverse-events.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cdc.gov&#x2F;coronavirus&#x2F;2019-ncov&#x2F;vaccines&#x2F;safety&#x2F;ad...</a>

Honestly I think they should have had their meeting before telling the public. It seems unnecessary to pause it before figuring out if its worth it unless theres something else they&#x27;re not telling us, which in that case it&#x27;s also hurting trust in the system.<p>No matter what they come back with, the JnJ vaccine is done. We might as well start shipping them out to other countries that desperately need them, especially if we supposedly have enough mrna vaccines coming for everyone.

As is typical for this comment thread, in this comment I will claim that pausing the Johnson &amp; Johnson vaccine will lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths because that is how many people will die if we do not have a vaccine. All this to save 1 out of 7 million lives. In passing I would like to call everybody involved in the decision idiotic.

Nobody seem to discuss that this issue appears around 10 days after getting the vaccine. And I believe most of the doses have been given over the last 10 days. So we actually don&#x27;t know yet the real incidence of this issue. It makes sense for the FDA to be cautious here, there are other vaccines which are fully available.

Covid itself causes blood clotting in many seriously ill patients. A friend, who was in ICU in March 2020, was given Herparin (due to clotting concerns), and was told to take aspirin at home after release.<p>Is it surprising that the vaccines cause clotting too? Isn&#x27;t this sort of obvious?

Why are women adversely affected?

Interesting. Almost definitely something to do with adenoviruses then. I would imagine that Sputnik probably also has this side-effect. I wonder if &quot;wild&quot; adenovirus infection does this too.<p>Deciding whom to give these vaccines to is a complicated decision for each country to make and depends on:<p>a) The incidence rate for each demographic of CSVT-type clotting from the vaccine[s].<p>b) The expected distribution of clinical outcomes from those events, making reasonable assumptions about likelihood of early detection and outcomes with treatment for heparin induced thrombosis.<p>Those two give you the clinical cost.<p>Then you compare those with the clinical benefit from:<p>1) The relative likelihood of infection for a person, given their demographics, personal exposure profile etc.<p>2) The absolute likelihood of infection in the country &#x2F; region in question based on assumptions about the future of the pandemic<p>3) The expected distribution of clinical outcomes from infection given the person&#x27;s characteristics<p>(2) is important because you&#x27;re comparing a one-time risk of side-effects with a time-related risk of infection.<p>Clearly, the same person in Manaus or Adelaide is not really making the same trade-off even if in the abstract, the side-effects and IFR are the same.<p>You also need the counterfactual: If you decide not to give an ad vectored vaccine, you are <i>not</i> deciding never to vaccinate, you are deciding that this person will get a different vaccine, probably later. How much later depends on the location. If you&#x27;re in the US, you&#x27;ve got Moderna and Pfizer&#x2F;Biontech coming out of your ears so it might only delay any individual vaccination by a few weeks. If you&#x27;re a healthy 25 year old who can work from home, the risk trade-off of having to wait an extra 6 days is very different than that same person if they have to wait another 6 months.<p>As a result, different countries, looking at the same data will rationally make different decisions. The US has lots of mRNA vaccines so will choose one thing, the EU has been badly hit by the failure of Sanofi&#x2F;GSK to deliver a working vaccine (and by AstraZeneca scaling problems) but has quite a lot Pfizer production capacity, the UK has used up its Pfizer stocks and will now only use it for second shots. CureVac and Novavax may be able to supply some doses at some point but aren&#x27;t in the picture yet. Several European countries are negotiating to get Sputnik but that is also ad vectored so may have the same problem. That changes the risk calculation because it changes the time that people will remain unvaccinated in the counterfactual where ad vectored vaccines are not used for their age group.<p>All of this is before the complicated public health element of keeping messages for the public simple and the issues caused by changing that message frequently.<p>I don&#x27;t know to what degree countries that had set relatively high minimum ages for the use of AZ had been counting on J&amp;J for younger people. In many cases, AZ deliveries were sufficiently slow due to yield problems that it was &quot;free&quot; from a scheduling point of view to restrict it to only the oldest since the expectation was that they would only receive enough for those anyway and could use other vaccines for younger groups. If J&amp;J was a big part of that, then they now have to update that calculation because the counterfactual to using AZ for those people is no longer &quot;do them with J&amp;J next week&quot;. That may be hard to communicate to people who had been told that a particular vaccine was not safe in their age group previously but may now be asked to take it anyway.<p>I&#x27;m glad that I don&#x27;t have to make these decisions. They are not easy ones.

I was planning on getting the J&amp;J because I will most likely only be able to get one dose. Is a single dose of the mRNA vaccines effective in any meaningful way?

We’ve completely transformed human civilization in a desperate attempt to slow down the spread of this virus that kills 1 in 200 people, and now we don’t want to use one of the miracle cures because of a literal one in a million chance of issues.<p>People are absolute garbage at thinking about scale.

I like how BBC calls the vaccine made in the UK the Oxford-AV vaccine but can&#x27;t call this correctly the Janssen vaccine.

Just a hunch but I suspect there may be more than “6” cases of blood clotting with the vaccine in the US.

Our entire political leadership is focused on risk mitigation, and it’s entirely tiresome.

Everyone posting here confidently saying that the FDA is clearly wrong is pretty disappointing to me.<p>I think of all the comments about how &quot;MBAs&quot; and &quot;marketing people&quot; just don&#x27;t get software development. And then I look at software development people who seem to think they clearly get medical research and regulation.

I just made this website to show you how really, really small the risks are, and how they compare to risks we happily take every single day.<p>whatoneinamillionmeans.com<p>If you&#x27;re not willing to take 1 in a million chances, it&#x27;s gonna be pretty hard for you to get out of bed today.<p>This vaccine seems to have about the same rate, which makes sense as I think it uses the same technology.

I got the Johnson and Johnson vaccine and I feel fine but this news troubles me.

Awful decision. Everyone involved should be fired or removed from office for grotesque lack of judgement leading to a significant net increase in mortality.

I personally had an adverse reaction to this vaccine. I had a fever and extreme fatigue for 2 days. I am a relatively healthy 30-year-old male.

I think this is an example of where government transparency would greatly aid the discourse and build trust.<p>Where is the math that suggests that pausing the J&amp;J vaccine is prudent? Inputs being risk of getting covid, risk of getting a blood clot, risk of injury&#x2F;death from covid, risk of a new covid variant appearing, etc.<p>Without that transparency we’re all just guessing.

Massachusetts DPH has now shutdown administering J&amp;J vaccines (of which MA got a large batch last week) and have been cancelling J&amp;J appointments:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MassDPH&#x2F;status&#x2F;1381947053287354368?s=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;MassDPH&#x2F;status&#x2F;1381947053287354368?s=20</a>

&gt; “This announcement will not have a significant impact on our vaccination plan: Johnson &amp; Johnson vaccine makes up less than 5 percent of the recorded shots in arms in the United States to date,” White House Covid-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients said in a statement.<p>At least they have alternatives. Meanwhile, in Europe ...

We allow people to receive no vaccination at all. But we won&#x27;t allow them to get this vaccine if they want it?<p>This reminds me about all those governments that allow people to buy and sell cigarettes, but ban the sale of raw milk.<p>Can we just name this &quot;Raw Milk Syndrome&quot;?

J&amp;J must not be paying the right people...

I&#x27;m trying to understand why this isn&#x27;t ridiculous, and I&#x27;m not sure what that reason could be.<p>The disease left to its own accord has the potential to kill millions (someone please correct me on this). Why would we pause a vaccine because 6 people in 7 million got blood clots? Why would we do that and risk fueling anti-vaccine viewpoints?<p>I&#x27;m baffled, but perhaps I&#x27;m a fool.

From the article:<p>“I think this is a very low risk issue, even if causally linked to the vaccine: 6 cases with about 7 million doses (lower than the risk of clots with oral contraceptives) is not something to panic about,” Dr. Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, said in an email.

so, let me get this straight. you have vaccines that use a new tech (mrna) that are awesome and vaccines that use “old tech” and at least 2 of then produce blood clots?<p>something is weird here. i’m not saying this is due to mass hysteria generated by people that don’t want the vaccine but this does sure look like a case where we don’t understand relative risk.<p>i may be ignorant and not understand all the factors but I don’t see the data that allows me to understand if suspending this vaccine is a good thing or nkt.

Behold, the vaccine experts of Hacker News!

Six cases in seven million administered doses. One death.<p>Meanwhile, hormonal birth control causes clots in 1&#x2F;1,000 women. No one blinks an eye.<p>The vaccine hesitancy this engenders is likely gonna kill more than that one person.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;NateSilver538&#x2F;status&#x2F;1381936112311148548" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;NateSilver538&#x2F;status&#x2F;1381936112311148548</a><p>&gt; Public health bureaucrats have some weird habits in how they reason under uncertainty and how they communicate to the public. It might help if they sought out experts from economics, sociology, psychology, etc., instead of telling everyone to stay in the their lane.

A pause on vaccines will cause far more deaths than a 1 in 1 million chance of blood clots.

Message to anti-vaxxers: As you can see the government is very carefully tracking any kind of safety issues with vaccines. They are being open and telling you about issues despite people fearing it would cause vaccine hesitancy.<p>So this should actually give you <i>more</i> confidence in vaccine safety, because if there are problem, you <i>will</i> be informed.

The CDC and FDA have done a terrible job in my opinion with the pandemic. They are prime example of government institutional decay. The consiquentalists will win because the J&amp;J vax helps more people than it hurts. This will only add to vax hesitancy. When the dust settles this decision will kill more people than it saves. I had the J&amp;J vax. I got side effects but I now have some immunity to COVID-19 and it&#x27;s worth it.

I love how people are complaining about this decision without addressing the fact that there are two other vaccines that don&#x27;t have this issue that have been used orders of magnitude more.<p>Why wouldn&#x27;t you pause J&amp;J? It&#x27;s just a drop in the bucket in total vaccinations anyway and the other two don&#x27;t have this issue.

Makes sense.<p>Given there are some organizations that are forcing you to get a vaccination. 1 in a million chance of dying from something you were forced to do is different than 1 in a million chance of a pseudo-random event. Makes no sense to continue with J&amp;J given the other two don&#x27;t have this issue at the moment.<p>Of course, the utilitarian approach is to simply continue vaccinating with J&amp;J since surely more people are helped than harmed. I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll reverse this decision soon enough.

I trust the experts here in the FDA and the CDC. These are people that have been working their entire lives in vaccines and vaccine approval. They understand the medicine, the understand the policy.. if there&#x27;s anything that most people here could think of, the odds are astronomically low that they haven&#x27;t considered it.<p>It is very encouraging that this appears to be a science led decision.<p>Unsure why I&#x27;ve been downvoted, but if you&#x27;ve worked in FAANG level tech and with scientific staff of the CDC&#x2F;FDA, you would not think that the caliber of people on either side was much different. There are a very, very large number of Moderna and Pfizer&#x2F;Biontech doses going out at this point. The bigger risk is 501Y.V2 and company evolving to escape the vaccine, and that is not going to be fixed by a week long pause in J&amp;J&#x2F;Jannsen to identify the source and treatment for the errant platelet response.

I must say, the general state of discourse on HN has severely deteriorated over the past year (mostly in line with other online platforms, I suppose)<p>COVID is the single worst thing to happen to civil discussion in my lifetime. The virus is obviously a risk. So are the vaccines. Acting any other way is just downright disingenuous.<p>At the end of the day, any person with a working brain is free to calculate those risks on their own. No persuading, name-calling, or outright rudeness is needed. (Yes, the top 5 comments I&#x27;m talking about you)<p>In times like this, I&#x27;m reminded of most historical calamities...in which a small minority stood on one side, another small minority on the other, but the vast majority simply stood in the middle and thought &quot;Please let this end&quot;<p>Please upvote this if you&#x27;re just an average person waiting in the middle.