I've been a weak defender of the CDC against some of the overwrought attacks against it, but their handling of the J&J vaccine deserves all the condemnation we can muster:
When Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine was authorized for emergency use in late February, it was seen as a breakthrough for reaching vulnerable and isolated Americans, a crucial alternative to vaccines that require two shots weeks apart and fussier storage. It was soon popular on college campuses, in door-to-door campaigns and with harder-to-reach communities that often struggle with access to health care.
But with only 11.8 million doses administered in the United States so far — less than 4 percent of the total — the “one and done” vaccine has fallen flat. States have warned for weeks that they may not find recipients for millions of doses that will soon expire, partly because the vaccine’s appeal dropped after it was linked to a rare but serious blood-clotting disorder and injections were paused for 10 days in April....Health officials in a number of other states presented a similarly discouraging picture. The pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, they said, effectively kicked it aside for good.
The blood clotting disorder was always super rare and everyone knew it. The risk of staying unvaccinated and dying from COVID-19 was far greater than the risk of the blood clot.
Of course, other countries had already made the same mistake, led by Germany, the mistake king of Europe. The whole thing is infuriating. The J&J vaccine is perfectly safe and perfectly fine; it can be transported with nothing more than normal refrigeration; and it's perfect in places where getting people to agree to one shot is hard enough, let alone getting them to come back for a second. What a mess.
Being Swiss I always enjoy some German bashing. But please: Germany the "mistake king" of EU? Germany made fewer COVID-related mistakes than most of its European peers (certainly fewer than Switzerland...). Stay real, please!
As nations go, post WWII (West-)Germany is exemplary. If you don't believe me just look at Japan and how the two nations deal with their collective guilt and their horrible legacy!
strictly on vaccine roll out...
😉
As to the argument about J&J: This is classic Monday morning quarterbacking. Now that the problem is resolved we pretend it never existed. Also tunnel vision: There are many causes that may make people prefer the mRNA vaccines, for example the simple fact that J&J is 70% effective, the other two 90%. To assign all of the effect to this one cause is sloppy thinking in the extreme.
Fort he vast majority of Americans the two shot regime is only a minor inconvenience. Hence they decide quite naturally to choose the higher effectiveness. As soon as availability is no problem any more that is where the market will gravitate to.
Treating these things by the book (which is what was done in this case) ends up being the correct way in most cases. Just look at the UK and the delta variant. Boris Johnson, too clever by half as always, decided to give people only one of two shots to spread out the vaccine. Fauci counseled against that at the time. And now the delta variant has exposed the problem with the Boris-approach.
As someone who is in exactly the demographic that is at highest risk of blood clot from J&J, why on earth would I take a riskier vaccine that offers lower protection? A single trip to the pharmacy hardly seems worth the added risk.
Plus, J&J has been plagued by a lot of manufacturing errors. That just makes it even less appealing.
Maybe trucking J&J around rural India makes sense, even if it kills a few dozen women (the places that really need an easy one-shot dose are not going to be able to treat those clots effectively). But it definitely does not make sense in the US at this point.
Condemnation? Come on now… don’t forget the mRNA vaccines cause sterility in women and make people magnetic! Everyone who needs or wants a vaccination can get it easily. The pandemic is over and so send all this vaccine overseas… or just stop making it. It’s certainly not worth worrying about at this stage. Enough with the vaccine hysteria.
And they permit Bill Gates to track you wherever you go. And they permit you to travel through time.
I didn’t turn magnetic but I did turn into a crocodile. It was bad at first but I was able to get a job with Steve Pastis so it’s all good now.
They aren't succesfully making it.
get a shot in the arm, and they control your hand...
Dr. Strangelove it is!
I wonder about the effectiveness of the J&J vaccine against the Delta variant, as well. Two doses of the mRNA vaccines seem to work well, but a single dose not as well.
Exactly.
The Delta variant seems to be the one to worry about right now.
How well does J&J work against it?
I have NO CLUE.
But it scares me
This is a great point and one that Kevin completely overlooks. I got the J&J vaccine, and I’m wondering if I should get amine of the mRNA vaccines as well. Why? Because seemingly every single article talks only about mRNA vaccines. I haven’t seen a single thing written about the effectiveness of J&J against the Delta strain.
According to the Seattle Times (yesterday, 6/17), the Delta variant (B.1.617) is spreading in WA, but does not appear to affect people who have already had both their shots and gotten to full effectiveness. Unfortunately Gamma (P.1) is ALSO here, accounting for 16% of cases and is now the fastest spreading variant. It is associated with higher hospitalization rates and an increase in breakthrough infections. It may also be resistant to antibody treatments although that’s still a bit speculative at this point.
They said ALL the vaccines were close to 100% effective in keeping us out of the hospital.
Now it seems the BEST are only about 90% effective in keeping the Delta variant cases from going to the hospital.
Does anyone have a clue on how well the J&J vaccine does in keeping people out of the hospital?
I am still trying my best to stay away from people at work and when I am out.
Maybe I am too cautious. I wish someone had some guidance.
As much as I agree that the temporary halt to using J & J was not the best idea given the overwhelming data in support of its safety, it wasn't the best choice for most people when the mRNA vaccines were available. Vaccine supplies just have to be managed now for decreasing numbers of people turning up to be vaccinated. We should not feel bad about having to discard expiring batches. The important thing is we had them when people wanted them.
The difficulty is that vaccines are in short supply almost anywhere in the world. And we have to destroy expired batches. Not good at all!
Drum was making up the crap about expired batches. J&J had to destroy batches that failed quality control.
https://jabberwocking.com/update-the-jj-vaccine-pause-probably-had-no-effect-on-vaccine-hesitancy/
KD: "The J&J vaccine is perfectly safe and perfectly fine..."
No it's not "perfectly" anything. Nothing is. Perfect means zero problems.
Elsewhere -- KD: "...this time we actually have a vaccine that can crush it completely."
"Completely" would mean zero infections and zero deaths. Neither is the case.
What's wrong with just being accurate? Lazy exaggerations do not make for good writing.
+1
Dear Lord, the "You didn't say your words right" argument. So you believe that the only time the word 'perfect' can be used is when referring to a mathematical proof.
Pull the other one; its got bells on.
Kevin and others do not appreciate what might have happened if there had been some serious problem with reaction to any of the vaccines. This would probably have been a much more serious blow than a halt. It is important to know that the authorities are not recklessly authorizing things without safety checks. Are the authorities just supposed to pretend that they are infallible or that there could never be any adverse effects?
By the way, I wonder how much testing was done on the really vulnerable population, especially the elderly. The efficacy as it pertains to total death toll could be way off if the vulnerability is not considered. Most younger people are not going to die if they get covid anyway.
The vulnerable group in this blood clot case are middle aged women, not the elderly. Things don't always line up neatly in one dimension.
Its actually women of child bearing age, i.e. young, not middle age women.
And young men are now at risk for mRNA hear inflammation.
Forget being a riot-control officer in Portland... the real Kobayashi Maru scenario is being at the CDC or FDA for that matter. Pause to make certain everything is indeed really sufficiently OK and you are too hesitant. Not do so and something go wrong and you are reckless.
Kevin, surely you can recall the fun with the swine flu epidemic of 1976? https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/long-shadow-1976-swine-flu-vaccine-fiasco-180961994/ and even if you cannot, I suspect the institutional memory within the CDC or FDA does. (Note, that article is from 2017, so there was enough memory of it 31 years later to warrant a magazine article...)
Web search for "swine flu vaccine 1976" and you will likely find a number of other articles ranging in time from 2013 to 2020.
There is no actual evidence that the 1976 vaccine cause any guillain-Barre syndrome. Incidence amongst those who got the vaccine was not appreciably different from incidence in the general public.
There was also talk that the vaccination program wasn't need since the swine flu really didn't take off. Of course, if the vaccination program was effective, it wouldn't have taken off.
The nature of public health, nobody appreciates it when it works,indeed, people will mock it, but everyone gets upset when it doesn't.
I wasn't aware people are/were choosing what vaccine to get. I always assumed it worked the same way it did for me which was I showed up as soon as I could and I got whatever it was they had.
Also because it appears there is more than enough of the other vaccines, storage requirements for those have been simplified, and they likely have a higher effectiveness, why would we expect there to be more than small minority of people who opt for the J&J even if there hadn't been a pause.
No one wants th J&J vaccine when we have "better" alternatives available. That's all it's come down too. By the time the pause was started we already were heading to a suplus of Pfizer and Moderna. AZ is still languishing without approval. J&J could have helped - if it was available sooner. But production delays and contamination meant it was too little too late.
I bet Kevin didn't get the J&J vaccine either, so whining about it is beside the point now.
I think it's weird that you would spend so much ink bitching about a pause late in the game that probably had extremely limited effect on deaths, while doing a pass on the flubs of the Trump administration's actions, given the 550,000 deaths in-between the pause and the start of the pandemic.
But hey, maybe it's just me.
Kevin is trying to join Dennis Miller, Jon Stewart, & Glemm Greemwald in the cranky white Yung Boomer demographic.
Surprised jabberwocking hasn't linked to Jon Stewart's intentional Wuhan lableak rant.
Not just you.
Kevin is ignoring that there is not J&J vaccine to go bad or to shoot in anyones arms. J&J has failed miserably at successfully producing any vaccine after the first 12 million doses. What ever happened to the deal they had wiht Merk for merk to produce this vaccine?
And the Emergent Fiasco as well where they had to throw out gazillions of doses and raw materials that were ruined by incompetence.
The CDC is terrific at doing the science, but terrible at advising us on public policy. The skills needed for the latter require thinking through the consequences of what you say and how to manage how the public will understand the science and the risks. We need to get people who understand how to manage public perception of science in between the CDC and the closest microphones.
One of the lingering negative effects of the Trump Presidency is that the de facto authority of the President and the White House to manage a major crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic has been undermined. The media are now looking to the CDC rather than the White House for information about the pandemic because Trump wouldn't provide reliable information.
A particular weakness with the CDC messaging is that they don't coordinate messaging with the states at all, so you have the CDC and the fifty states all doing their own messaging. Trying to get different political entities to agree on a common message is a political task, one the CDC has neither the ability nor the mandate to undertake.
Don't forget, the CDC was being gutted by the Trump administration--or at least they were trying to defund it.
"The CDC is terrific at doing the science, .."
Actually they aren't as shown by their inability to produce in a timely way a COVID test that worked at the start of the epidemic.
That was not a science issue so much as a supply chain management issue. Another skill the CDC has shown a decided lack of.
Yes, the various vaccine scares were certainly being played up by anti-vaxxers.
Young women who are concerned should go with Moderna or Pfizer. Young men, it concerned, could go with J&J.
And J&J does well against the variants:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/06/09/1004738276/new-evidence-suggests-covid-19-vaccines-remain-effective-against-variants
Novavax is looking good too. Also a different technology--pieces of spike protein on nanoparticles, so not mRNA or a an andenovirus vector.
Maybe I missed it but the link you gave doesn't even MENTION the words J&J
The Australian government has been equally inept, if not more so, if that makes you feel any better. It invested heavily in the AstraZeneka vaccine, with some back-up Pfizer orders that got delayed by the EU. After one person died from a blood clot after getting the AZ vaccine, it announced that only people over 50 would get it from then on. Younger folk would get the Pfizer vaccine. Last week a woman in her 50s died from a blood clot, and they announced new guidelines limiting the AZ vaccine to people over 60.
The Health Minister said he expected these changes might be contributing to some 'vaccine hesitancy' in the community. Ya think?
Blame your colleagues in the media. The very second I heard the talking robots on the evening network news hollering about the lethal blood clots, I knew the J&J vaccine was done, no matter what else gets said. Doesn't matter how rare it is. It could be 1 in a trillion.
Doesn't matter. All that matters is selling cell phone contracts and cars and telling viewers to "ask your doctor if XYZ is right for you." The news producers don't give a rat's ass what they are doing to public health or democracy or anything else, all they want it eyeballs to sit through the commercials and find out about the vaccine that kills you.
The CDC was put in an impossible position. The problem is that our society consists in large part of spoiled children who expect problems to be solved in the time taken by a single Netflix standard series streaming episode.
I'm appalled at the lack of responsibility shown by the American populace in prolonging the epidemic through their own immaturity, laziness, and ignorance.