I got vaccinated against the coronavirus at Lubber Run Community Center in Arlington, Virginia, on April 10. It was the single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine. It was a perfectly safe vaccine, and no one I know who took it has had any significant side effects. Now, I don’t have to worry about catching COVID-19, or giving it to my family. I experienced nothing other than a tiny twinge in my arm from getting the shot. No side effects whatsoever.
Yet, soon after I took the vaccine, the vaccine was temporarily pulled because an incredibly tiny number of people apparently got blood clots from it. As experts like Stanford University’s David Henderson have noted, suspending the vaccine even temporarily made no sense. The percentage of people who could conceivably get blood clots from the vaccine is much tinier than the percentage of unvaccinated people who will catch the coronavirus and get serious complications from it (or even die from it, the way half a million elderly people have).
As Daniel Bier notes, the temporary suspension of the vaccine made vaccination rates dramatically fall, by unjustifiably making people fear the vaccine, even though the vaccine is quite safe. As he observes, “the vaccination program was mortally wounded on April 13″ when the vaccine was temporarily suspended. “If we don’t manage to revive it, we could miss the herd immunity threshold. Existing trends have us ending up at 64% of the adult population vaccinated. Hopefully, with natural immunity, that will be enough.”
