The Month that Just Won't End.

YESTERDAY I GOT MY SECOND SHOT!

That’s it though, I don’t want to celebrate too much because when I woke up this morning I saw that the Johnson & Johnson roll out of vaccines has been “paused” apparently over concerns about blood clots. To date something like 6.8 million J&J shots have been administered and there have only been six reports of possibly related blood clots.

I know this is how safe science is supposed to work, but damn, that is just a kick in the gut. Having no special knowledge about any of this, I know that when the EU briefly paused their AstaZeneca roll out over concerns about blood clots, they determined that the occurrences of vaccinated people with blood clots was actually lower than in the population over all, so I’m hoping that a similar type of determination could be made in this case. Fingers crossed.

Maybe things had been seeming to be getting slightly better lately and maybe that is why the J&J thing has hit me so hard this morning. I’m a big fan of thinking about second and third and fourth order effects and the ripple effects this could cause in the supply chain and in the culture could really be significant.

I’ve been concerned for awhile now that America isn’t actually going to reach a herd immunity threshold, basically because we are a nation of anti-science assholes, and this is not going to help matters any. People who were on the fence about vaccines because they only believe in handguns and healing crystals, will now have yet one more data point to misunderstand. The irony of course being that a pause like this over six possible blot clot occurrences should actually INCREASE their trust in the way science and medicine work specifically because when there was even a whiff of a problem, the distribution was stopped so more information could be collected. That is the sign of a system working, not the sign of a vaccine failing.

It is also a bummer that no matter what this means the overall vaccine distribution will be slowed to at least some degree and that means we may not hit those optimistic thresholds we’d all been hoping for; July 4th barbeques and life looking normal-ish by Fall. The pause means this whole thing could stretch on longer and we’ll be stuck in this situation where some people are vaccinated and others who want it aren’t and that is not a good recipe for anything.

Here we are in April of 2021 and yet it turns out we still are not as done with March 2020 as we’d thought.

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