On Thursday, an advisory panel for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) voted to recommend the Pfizer or Moderna COVID-19 vaccines over the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, citing the risk of severe blood clots from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
The risk of severe blood clots was also why the Biden administration temporarily paused the administering of the J&J vaccine earlier this year, which caused significant vaccine hesitancy. At the time of the pause, there were six cases of patients with severe blood clots out of nearly 7 million.
There have now been 17 million people who have received the single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine; only nine people died after developing severe blood clots, and most of them were 30-to-49-year-old women—which is a 0.000053% chance of dying from a severe blood clot from the J&J vaccine.
According to the CDC, “More than 485 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines were administered in the United States from December 14, 2020, through December 13, 2021. During this time, VAERS received 10,483 reports of death [0.0022%] among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine.” However, the CDC says, “Reports of adverse events to VAERS following vaccination, including deaths, do not necessarily mean that a vaccine caused a health problem.” So even if all of these deaths could be attributed directly to the vaccines, it’s a really, really low risk. Further, the overall chance of dying from a severe blood clot from the J&J vaccine [0.000053%] —which, I must point out, is the reason the CDC is recommending Pfizer and Moderna over it—is less than the number of reports of death following all vaccine doses (0.0022%).
So, why is the J&J vaccine getting bashed by the Biden administration?
It seems to me that the Biden administration was always biased in favor of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines—which are not traditional vaccines, but mRNA vaccines, which use messenger RNA (mRNA) to teach human cells to make a protein that triggers an immune response in our bodies to a disease. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are the only authorized or approved mRNA vaccines we have right now, but it seems that our medical experts have wanted to transition from traditional egg-grown vaccines to mRNA for some time.
Roughly a year before the COVID pandemic began, Dr. Anthony Fauci spoke at the Milken Institute Future of Health Summit. He discussed the “transition” from traditional vaccines to mRNA vaccines.
“Why don’t we blow the system up?” asked Michael Specter of The New Yorker. “I mean obviously, we can’t just turn off the spigot on the system. We have and then say, ‘Hey everyone in the world should get this new vaccine that we haven’t given to anyone yet.’ But there must be some way that—we grow vaccines mostly in eggs the way we did in 1947.”
Dr. Fauci responded by pointing out the long process the new types of vaccines would have to go through for approval.
“In order to make the transition from getting out of the tried-and-true egg growing which we know gives us results that can be beneficial, I mean we’ve done well with that. There must be something that has to be much better,” he began. “You have to prove that this works and then you’ve got to go through all of the clinical trials: phase one, phase two, phase three, and then show that this particular product is going to be good over a period of years. That alone, if it works perfectly, it’s going to take a decade.”
That’s when Rick Bright, the director of HHS Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), chimed in and said, “There might be a need or even an urgent call for an entity of excitement out there that’s completely disruptive, that’s not beholden to bureaucratic strings and processes. […] But it is not too crazy to think that an outbreak of novel avian virus could occur in China somewhere. We could get the RNA sequence from that, beam it to a number of regional centers—if not local, if not even in your home at some point—and print those vaccines on a patch of self-administer.”
So, is this really about an objective cost-benefit analysis between the vaccines, or is this the Biden administration’s way of pushing mRNA vaccines? All the vaccines come with risks, and it’s on us to weigh those risks against the potential benefits. The Biden administration is clearly choosing to favor the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.
The question I leave you with is: why?
