With this morning’s news that the CDC and FDA ordered a pause in the administration of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, it’s becoming clear that it “creates a scramble for governors already dealing with vaccine hesitancy”:
Today's J&J news creates a scramble for governors already dealing with vaccine hesitancy. "I can't overstate how bad this is going to be," one GOP state official told me. "What we are going to deal with, it's not just a J&J issue now, it's a vaccine issue."
— Caitlin Huey-Burns (@CHueyBurns) April 13, 2021
And, “There’s nothing we can do to restore confidence. No ad that is going to work on something like this”:
"There's nothing we can do to restore confidence. No ad that is going to work on something like this," the GOP state official said. https://t.co/8VacHdAOpM
— Caitlin Huey-Burns (@CHueyBurns) April 13, 2021
Stats expert Nate Silver called the whole thing “a disaster,” adding “this is going to get people killed”:
6 cases out of 7 million people. What a disaster. This is going to get people killed. And it's going to create more vaccine hesitancy. These people don't understand cost-benefit analysis. They keep making mistakes by orders of magnitude. https://t.co/DQdvqoujHR
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
Maybe it’s time to stop listening so much to “public health bureaucrats”?
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.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
Recommended
More from Silver:
If out of the blue one morning Gov. Newsom was like "Shark attacks are extremely rare, but out of an abundance of caution, we're closing every beach in California until we investigate more", that's not likely to get more people to go out to the beach, even once beaches reopen.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
It's also a high-stakes test for the FDA, and they failed it, because of course lots of people are going to take away the latter message. https://t.co/dVlBxi2tYA
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
There's also data on this based on decreased public confidence in the AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe following similar pauses there. So the FDA can't even use the excuse of flying blind.https://t.co/3I2rlLhfyz
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
Also, part of the reason media coverage may be confused is that the FDA's reasoning isn't super logical. It probably isn't rational to pause administration of a vaccine that's already been given out 7 million times for "extremely rare" events in the middle of a deadly pandemic.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
Why did the FDA recommend the pause anyway? Because of a combination of institutional culture, cognitive biases, and bureaucratic imperatives incentives, they greatly overweight the importance of rare adverse effects relative to people dying from COVID.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
But unless they know about that institutional culture, it's understandable that regular folks may think "hmm, maybe there's more going on". Especially when public health officials have eroded trust by telling a lot of "noble lies" to people, e.g. in the early days re: masks.
— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 13, 2021
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Related:
Dem Sen. Brian Schatz gets a math lesson after responding to the FDA-CDC decision to pause Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine https://t.co/hXQaNR662z
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) April 13, 2021
New York Times: The FDA and CDC will 'call for an immediate pause in use of Johnson & Johnson's single-dose coronavirus vaccine' https://t.co/uRVdj9rfFi
— Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) April 13, 2021
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