The Disastrous J&J Pause

We were told that the J&J pause was necessary to prevent vaccine hesitancy. I never understood the certainty people expressed on this point, even people who were relatively good on other issues. In anycase, as the excellent Daniel Bier argues, the best explanation for the data right now is that the J&J pause increased vaccine hesitancy.

Could the plunge timing have been a coincidence? Perhaps the eager had already gotten their vaccinations, leaving only the less eager and more hesitant. Maybe. But note that younger people were getting vaccinated rapidly before the pause and at increasing rates in line with the rates of the older people who had been vaccinated before them. But then the vaccination rates of the young plummeted, just as for the old. In other words, the plunge started in all age groups at the same time but at very different levels of vaccination. The similar timing across age groups is easy to explain if it was the J&J pause (everyone saw the pause at the same time) but it requires multiple coincidences to explain why every age group would reach their hesitancy point at different levels of vaccination but at the same time.

My view is that neither the CDC nor the FDA should be playing psychological games with the public. Just give it to us straight. In this case, since there was never much doubt that the J&J vaccine was much safer than COVID, a bulletin to physicians would have been appropriate to the circumstances. We don’t know for certain what would have happened under that counterfactual (although the data from Britain v. Europe on the AZ pause suggest a bulletin would not have generated the same hesitancy) but it would have been the right decision on the evidence.

See Bier’s tweet thread for further breakdown of the data.