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To the editor: The finding that six women developed blood clots in the brain’s draining veins after they received the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine is of concern. Yet the full context of federal agencies’ recommended pausing of the use of this vaccine requires additional information.
The natural occurrence of such clots is approximately 13 people per million. More than 7 million Johnson & Johnson vaccines have been administered. Assuming half went into women’s arms, the math suggests we might see 45 with blood clots.
Young women are a fraction of those who got the vaccine, but still, six out of 7 million may not be statistically different from background occurrence. Hormones and birth control medication are co-variables.
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To the editor: The appearance of virus variants is not some inevitable misfortune. It was quite foreseeable. As Dr. Anthony Fauci has said, the virus can only mutate if it replicates. (“California’s coronavirus strain looks increasingly dangerous: ‘The devil is already here.’”)
Our nation’s approach to the pandemic has been what I call the “thermostat policy.” If the rates of hospitalization and death are increasing, we lock down. If the rates are going then, we open up. This is the way a thermostat works, and its function is to keep things warm.
We don’t want to keep the virus warm. We don’t want the death rate to keep a happy medium. What we’ve done is provide the coronavirus ample opportunities to replicate, so now there are multiple new variants, some of which are more infectious and more deadly that previous ones.