Did the Costs of Pausing the J&J Vaccine Outweigh the Benefits?

Americans in states across the country started getting vaccinated with the Johnson & Johnson/Janssen Covid vaccine again yesterday, after regulators ended a suspension of the vaccine that had lasted almost two weeks. The FDA and the CDC decided to halt the use of the J&J vaccine on April 13 over concerns about a rare blood-clotting disorder that had been found in six people who had received it, one of whom had died. (AstraZeneca’s Covid vaccine, which is in wide use in the U.K. and Europe, has also been linked to blood clots). On Friday, ACIP, the CDC advisory panel on vaccines, after looking at all the data, concluded that the risks imposed by the vaccine were very low, and recommended that it be put back into general use, with a warning label attached.

Now, you might look at this story and assume that, as they say, “The system worked.” But it’d be more accurate to say that the system worked as it’s designed to work, and not as we might want it to work. While the initial decision to pause the vaccine was praised by many as evidence of the seriousness with which regulators were taking safety, that doesn’t mean the decision to extend the pause for almost two weeks represented a sensible balancing of costs and benefits. Instead, as medical ethicists Govind Persad and William Parker put it in The Washington Post last weekend, “slowing down…