Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

The people who actually do the science are allowed to speak their truth again, good and bad. I’m ok following their lead here.

 

You do know the people of Africa live in their own countries with their own governments whose risk/benefit calculations might just be somewhat different from our government's?

 

The decision to pause threw risk calculation out the window.

 

We could lose tens of thousands of people over a few hundred deaths.

Trumpian logic.

 

The people who are going to say "SIX PEOPLE GOT BLOODCLOTS! OMG!" are the same people who said "YOU HAVE A 99 PERCENT CHANCE OF SURVIVING THE VIRUS! WHY LIVE IN FEAR????"

 

Just looked it up. Most of the vaccine supply in African countries is the AstraZeneca vaccine, which the 31 countries in the so-called Covax initiative are continuing to use despite its documented blood clot effects. They are also trying to get the J&J vaccine. Those countries see their main problem as vaccine supply, not sporadic side effects of said vaccines.

 

A reminder we still don’t know the long term effects of COVID-19. So while we worry about potential long term effects of a vaccine modeled after vaccines we’ve used for more than a century, we’ll let more people get a virus we have no idea will effect people down the road.

It will take bravery and risk taking to beat this thing.

There’s going to be a variant that these things don’t protect us against if we don’t hurry up and we’ll be here staring at our shoes.

 

It would be fair to say that the blood clot issue with the J&J and AstraZeneca vaccines, which is real, is also close to the definition of a First World problem.

 

I’ll allow that we are in a much better position than any other country to simply go with the other two. But I’m worried if the JNJ vaccine gets this reputation that no one anywhere is going to want this thing.

 

This news is what, a few hours old? We will have better information soon enough. Hell we might have it by dinner. Forgive me if I don’t freak out just yet.

 

Oh, I’m purposely pressing a little hard from my side. I understand they didn’t take this step lightly. I bet they dreaded sending out that release more than I can imagine. I bet a lot of people debated all this for hours and hours from all angles.

I just think you’ve got to trust the vaccine you trusted enough to put into seven million arms already.

 

The core mission of the FDA is to insure all drugs and food consumed by Americans are as safe as possible. The core mission of the Centers for Disease Control is right there in the agency title. There would seem to be an obvious mission conflict regarding this decision, yet the CDC went along with the pause. I have to assume they gamed out this decision six ways from Sunday and decided it would do more harm for the overall vaccination effort if they just went full speed ahead with the J&J and the anecdotal evidence of the side effect got more and more common. There's no doubt a headline about 100 blood clot victims would get more attention than the phrase "out of 70 million doses."