I got tired of the "but the J&J negative side effects don't exceed annual rates" argument so I wrote this out. Please steal it and use it as copy-pasta with your relatives who are blindly quoting journalists who don't know how statistics work.

posted 12 days ago by acasper 12 days ago by acasper +9 / -0

The impacted portion of the US population seems to be women from 18 - 48 per the CDC. Including both genders, assuming it’s not a gender based issue and we have incomplete data, we would be dealing with at most 70% of the US population [1]. Within age sub-ranges in that larger range gender is roughly equally distributed with a variance of 0% - 1% depending on the specific sub-range [2].

As of April 4th more than 7.5 million doses of the J&J vaccine had been administered [3] with distribution expected to accelerate due to strong positive intervention from the Biden Administration in March to increase production volume and a partnership with Merck [4]. I think that it's reasonable to assume that the ratio of vaccines represented in the graph is not accurate due to that intervention and increased velocity, but lets stick with 7.5 million doses for the sake of supporting evidence. Additionally, note that J&J only received an Emergency Usage Authorization on February 27th meaning it has been distributed and administered for about a month and a half now [5].

Vaccination rates by gender have been studied to some degree for these vaccines by NIH/FDA/CDC but the data is a bit stale. It seems that women tend to get vaccinated at a higher rate than men based on this data [6]. Lets assume that trend continued through J&J being paused. Lets also assume that vaccination rates are consistent across age ranges as I wasn't able to find specific fresh data for that. This means that the cohort we're dealing with is more like 1.7 million individuals that may be at increased risk.

Assuming the 1.7 million number we can see how six cases within rapid succession is concerning assuming the incidence rate of of 3 - 4 cases per million in the adult population [7]. Researchers also note that it requires significant analysis to distinguish it from other conditions. As in the case of other clotting disorders it poses a latent risk if untreated even if asymptomatic for an extended period of time. Due to the recency of the EUA for J&J and the time CDC established for emergence of symptoms in these cases (9 - 13 days) there are 180,000 - 490,000 women who are in our at risk group of 1.7 million that wouldn't be expected to exhibit symptoms for the next one to two weeks.

I'm not trying to make an anti-vaccination argument. I'm trying to provide information that may be relevant when people are considering getting a vaccination, assessing the severity of symptoms post-vaccination, or assessing the reporting and recording standards for SARS2/COVID negative side-effect incidence versus negative side-effect incidence of these vaccines. There's a lot of wiggle room with statistics to make a point, but in this analysis I've really tried to wiggle in the "benefit of the doubt, lets not freak out" direction.

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