Johnson and Johnson

So some news broke about one of the major COVID-19 vaccines in the United States, the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. 6 people reported that they developed blood clots sometime after receiving the vaccine. These unintended side effects, while few, called for the deployment of the J&J vaccine to be halted so that it could be investigated further. This has of course sent those people into a frenzy of “WE WERE RIGHT” or “VACCINES ARE HARMFUL” or whatever flavor of anti-vax you prefer. Despite the circumstances around the vaccine rollout in the US, especially the J&J’s, anti-vaxxers have received their piece of evidence that will continue to propel their Degenerative Research Program.

Just looking at the J&J vaccine stats, approximately 7 million people have received this vaccine. Of them, 6 people reported blood clots, and it’s not even clear if the J&J vaccine is directly responsible for those clots. If we assume that the J&J vaccine is actually the cause of those clots that means that it causes clots in 0.00008% of applications. Of course, since blood clots sometimes go unreported the number of cases will likely rise over the next few days. But still that number is astronomically low. Compared to the death rate of COVID-19 itself which lies at approximately 3.4%, the risk of J&J seems negligible.

But the damage is already done, the DRP has already been fed new ammo that will likely impede the efforts of the rollout altogether. Now these blood clots are going to be used as key evidence that proves “we can’t trust vaccines”, never mind that no one directly has died from the J&J yet whereas ~565,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the United States alone. As mentioned in previous posts, there’s no real way to actually expunge a DRP because of their nature, firm believers are not going to accept information that would prove their hypothesis wrong, meaning that it is “impossible to be wrong”. The only way to fight DRPs is to make people aware of the signs that they may be falling into one and helping them get out through education or public shame.

But if you’re still reading this, you probably agree with me that the hubbub about the J&J vaccine is blown way out of proportion and that while these blood clots are a dangerous unintended side effect they don’t affect the vast majority of recipients as well as all of the people that have received the Moderna or Pfizer vaccines. And because of DRPs, no one that’s an anti-vaxxer would even believe what I’m saying at this point. No, the reason I wrote this was out of frustration due to this New York Post headline “University of Cincinnati student dead a day after getting J&J vaccine”. Crap like this is horrible for progress and the writers and editors responsible for letting this through should find another career. Not even 5 sentences into the article does it state “there is no evidence that his death is related to the Johnson & Johnson shot.” They know very much that most people don’t even read the article, only the headline and they chose the most inflammatory headline they could think of short of “J&J vaccine stabs child”. Thank you for reading me yell at a journalist.