In a pandemic we should do whatever kills fewer people
BY TOM CHIVERS
In April, the US Centres for Disease Control paused the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. They had noticed that among the 6.8 million people who had been given the J&J jab, six people had suffered a rare blood clot known as a “cerebral venous sinus thrombosis” (CVST). They said in a statement that they were recommending that healthcare providers stop using it, until the FDA had reviewed the evidence, and that they were doing so “out of an abundance of caution”.
Caution is a strange word to use. On the day they released the statement, about 70,000 new cases of Covid were confirmed in the United States, and about 1,000 people died of it. Is it “cautious” to stop using a vaccine which would almost certainly reduce those numbers, because of an uncertain chance that it might have negative effects in a tiny cohort?
But caution, in this sense, has been rife during the pandemic. The governments of various European countries stopped the use of the AstraZeneca vaccine over similar concerns. Germany, the Guardian reported in March, “was the first country to refuse to allow people over the age of 65 to have the AstraZeneca vaccine because of the absence of evidence of how well it worked in older people, indicating a more cautious approach than most”.
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