HMM: ACIP Punts on J&J COVID Vaccine — CDC advisors back continued “pause” until more data available.

Related: J&J Pause: ‘Gasoline’ for Vaccine Hesitancy. Well, yes. “So this looks like it’s a function of the adenovirus vector of the vaccine. We’re not seeing it at all in the mRNA vaccines. But tell me this, Vinay, help me understand this. Six cases of blood clots out of about seven million administrations, and one death. And they shut it down. I mean, help me understand. If they started doing that with all the medicines we use, we wouldn’t have Tylenol.”

Based on what we know, I’d still get the J&J vaccine since I’m not a woman of reproductive age. But we’ll see other weird low-frequency results, because we always do. And it’s hard to separate the signal from the noise. I have a friend who got her second Pfizer shot last week and has been without taste or smell since a couple of days afterward. Vaccine side effect? Late case of otherwise asymptomatic Covid? Unusually bad allergies? Unclear.

UPDATE: From the comments, apparently there are clots associated with the mRNA vaccines, too, at a similar low frequency: “Still, he said there were 35 cases of serious blood clots with the vaccine made by Pfizer/BioNTech among 54 million doses given; five cases with the Moderna vaccine among 4 million Europeans dosed.”

Plus: Thrombocytopenia following Pfizer and Moderna SARS‐CoV‐2 vaccination.

So if there are clots at roughly the same low rate with the other vaccines, why is only the J&J vaccine suspended? Seems to me that either they’ve overreacted on J&J, or they’ve underreacted on Moderna/Pfizer, or there’s a double standard here. But perhaps I’m missing something.