J&J vaccine pause the “less wrong” call

Calling for a temporary pause on administering Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine has generated what I actually view as healthy debate about the kinds of messages government officials send with such decisions.

The people at the CDC and FDA are essentially working to find the “least wrong” option when it comes to addressing developments such as the extremely rare incidence of women developing blood clots after receiving the J&J vaccine. They’re balancing short- and long-term goals that can come into conflict or reinforce each other, depending on the circumstances. They’re also operating in an environment in which both well-intentioned commentators and bad-faith actors have an unending number of platforms from which to broadcast critiques.

Quants such as 538’s Nate Silver look at six cases against roughly 7 million administered doses of the vaccine and correctly interpret it as no cause for concern. Unfortunately, our minds don’t really work that way. Salient examples of potentially harmful side effects have a way of sticking out. In other words, just telling people that the odds of suffering side effects are tiny isn’t sufficient for building confidence in the vaccine.

In the end, will pausing undermine confidence in the J&J vaccine among the population of people who truly are undecided about whether or not to take it? Yes.

If there were no pause and more reports of blood clots surface, which seems very likely, would that increase skepticism about the J&J vaccine? Yes, especially if government agencies can’t provide clear guidance about what that means for administering the vaccine going forward.

Would one of these scenarios have a stronger effect on vaccine uptake? That’s not clear.

In my mind, the pause demonstrates a level of rigor in government oversight that should solidify trust in the process that got the J&J vaccine and others like it to the market. Given that vaccinations can continue with the Moderna and Pfizer options, albeit not as efficiently, pausing the J&J vaccine feels like an appropriate response.