Day 15

The view from the UCV bedroom sometimes makes it feel like one is living in a tree fort.

Injections of the Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose covid vaccine came to a sudden halt in much of the United States on Tuesday following the emergence of a rare blood clotting in six recipients. One of those six recipients has died.

Nearly seven million Americans have received the J&J vaccine so far and only six have displayed the blood clotting. That’s less than one in every million recipients.  But since the health risk is approaching the one in a million threshold, officials correctly have decided to halt new injections while the health risks are being re-evaluated.

Conservatives and Fox News viewers, who already had reservations and concerns about the vaccine, will use this development to prove their point that the vaccines aren’t safe. Yet these are the same people who claim that the health risk from the covids is overstated, and that 99.9% of the people who contract the covids survive.

The 99.9% statistic is misleading. Not only does it ignore the suffering of those who became gravely ill from the disease but survived and the long-term health effects on many survivors, but the number is not even correct.  To date, some 31,200,000 Americans have contracted the covids, and about 562,000 have died. That’s 1.8% of the total, so in actuality, only 98.2% have survived.

To look at it in terms of health risk, roughly 2 out of every 100 persons who are infected by the covids dies. That’s an “acceptable” risk to the conservatives. On the other hand, less than one out of every million dies from the J&J vaccine (if the vaccine proves to even be the cause of the blood clotting). That’s an “unacceptable” risk to the conservatives. 

It is literally 10,000 times safer to get the vaccine than it is to get the covids.

As the data emerges, we’ll know more about whether or not the vaccines actually caused the blot clots, and what the actual health risk is. But all the available data so far shows you’re far, far better off with the J&J vaccine than without it.