Did the costs of pausing the J&J vaccine outweigh the benefits?

Beyond that, no matter how rigorous regulators try to be, they’re subject, like all of us, to cognitive biases. One of the most potent is the availability bias, which means that things that come immediately to mind (like people getting cerebral blood clots) have more influence on our decisionmaking than they otherwise would. The flipside of that is what you might call the unavailability — or invisibility — bias, and it’s just as potent: things you can’t see, and can’t document with 100% certainty, have less influence on our decisionmaking than they should. These things work together to push regulators, even if unconsciously, to overweight the risks of resuming vaccination and to underweight the risks of not doing it. Now, in the grand scheme of things, the costs of this delay were not great. There may be some impact on people’s attitudes toward the J&J vaccine, but it’s not clear how large that impact will be, and there seems to have been no impact on people’s willingness to take the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. But saying that the costs were not great is not the same as saying they were not important. At Friday’s meeting, the CDC’s Sara Oliver said that over the next 6 months, the J&J vaccine would be expected to result in 800–3500 fewer ICU admissions, and 600–1400 fewer deaths, while causing 26–45 cases of clotting. If you extrapolate from those numbers, they suggest that if the pause had ended 10 days earlier, somewhere between 33 and 75 lives would have been saved, at the cost of 1–2 cases of clotting.