1 death. The other cases are severe blood clotting but still alive by my understanding.
That's literally one-in-6-million chance of death with regards to this blood-clotting issue. A vanishingly smaller chance than the 1-in-40,000 (or 150-in-6-million) a healthy young person has of dying of COVID19.
So 1 death, 5 severe reactions related to blood clotting. Definitely a cause of concern, but lets not overplay the stats here.
This just another "Trolley problem": 150-people (even youngsters) would die from COVID19 vs the 1-person who died from the J&J vaccine.
If we include the general population (instead of focusing on the youngest and healthiest of us): COVID19 mortality rate is 1%ish, or 60,000-people-per-6-million.
You have to multiply the IFR by the odds that the person gets COVID to begin with. In countries where there's no community transmission (Australia) or in countries where it's possible to kill the virus just by vaccinating the at-risk population combined with shut-downs, the multiplier should be pretty small. Even in countries that have handled it badly, it still might be only a 1/3 or 1/2 chance of catching it. So as a young healthy person my chances of dying from COVID are probably less than 1/100000.
I bring this up because I think it misses the actual point. Even if the vaccine had a 1/100000 chance of death or major complications, I would still take it. Because my life is not the only one that matters. Killing the virus is likely (in this country) to require most people who are physically capable (including the young) of taking the vaccine. My taking on a 1/100k risk with the vaccine vs a 1/100k risk without the vaccine is worth it, because for most other adults, the risk is much greater than 1/100k if the population doesn't get vaccinated.
Fortunately, I don't think pausing J&J is necessarily the wrong decision, even given the argument I just made. AFAIK it's the least common of the three vaccines, and so there should not be many "missing" vaccinations that result from the pause. The fact that taking a risk is justified does not mean that pointless risk is justified.
It's not clear to me that the J&J vaccine's supply is large or critical enough that it's going to make that much of a difference (yet). If the supplies of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are such that most people with J&J appointments can just get one of the others instead, that's really not that big a deal.
Walk-ins might be affected, though, but I'm not sure what percentage of the total daily vaccinations are walk-ins vs. appointments.
And as a sibling mentions, the general risk of dying from COVID-19 is not 150 in 6M, because the probability of getting (symptomatic) COVID-19 needs to be factored into that figure. I would not be surprised that if that probability drops to under 1 in 6M after accounting for that, though of course the symptomatic infection risk differs based on demographics.
One thing that I am worried about, though, is that this might make people trust all the vaccines less in general. My girlfriend and I had J&J appointments for this Friday; fortunately we were able to get a walk-in Moderna shot today, but the issues with the J&J vaccine did give her a little anxiety even about the Moderna vaccine. I think that (and worse) might be pretty common, and isn't unreasonable.
1 death. The other cases are severe blood clotting but still alive by my understanding.
That's literally one-in-6-million chance of death with regards to this blood-clotting issue. A vanishingly smaller chance than the 1-in-40,000 (or 150-in-6-million) a healthy young person has of dying of COVID19.
So 1 death, 5 severe reactions related to blood clotting. Definitely a cause of concern, but lets not overplay the stats here.
This just another "Trolley problem": 150-people (even youngsters) would die from COVID19 vs the 1-person who died from the J&J vaccine.
If we include the general population (instead of focusing on the youngest and healthiest of us): COVID19 mortality rate is 1%ish, or 60,000-people-per-6-million.