Once again, the bureaucratic class refuses to relinquish its control over our COVID-crippled society.
The Biden administration has announced that it is halting the administration of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The only one of the three FDA-approved vaccines to use an older form of vaccine technology rather than novel mRNA science, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine appealed not just to those skeptical of the newer science but also to people with only the time or resources to receive one dose. And yet, the FDA and CDC have halted it because they found six recipients out of a total of 6.8 million who developed “a rare & severe type of blood clot.”
Six in 6.8 million.
So, after a year of destroying millions of jobs, creating a mental health and substance abuse epidemic, and forcing millions of children to “distance-learn” and thousands of seniors to die alone, we’re halting a vaccine that could get us out of this hellhole, all because six people out of 6.8 million reported blood clots that may not have even been caused by the vaccine.
If that’s the case, if it’s actually worth prolonging this pandemic because a vaccine might have caused blood clots in fewer than one in 1 million people, then we need to ban a myriad of other totally legal things that are much riskier.
Car crashes kill 124 people per million every year, yet we issue driver’s licenses to nearly everyone over 16. Never mind that we even give people second and third chances after DWIs. Just think of all the lives we could save if we just banned driving altogether!
You’re also much more likely to drown than get a mere blood clot from the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Ten Americans in 1 million die from drowning each year. The number would be much greater than that if we looked only at people who swim on a given day. Should we ban swimming?
Let’s take a look at what the FDA expressly endorses. Acetaminophen (also known as the brand Tylenol) is one of the most widely used drugs in the country, available over the counter, yet, it also sends 50,000 Americans to the emergency room each year for acute liver failure — that is, roughly 154 in 1 million. And again, the number would be much greater if we took as our denominator only those who take acetaminophen. Yet, anyone of any age can buy this drug.
None of this factors in the decisions we expressly made for this pandemic. Were the coronavirus deaths we prevented worth forcing women and children into lockdown with domestic abusers? Were the coronavirus deaths prevented worth making millions of children fall behind permanently in their education, with all the resultant obesity, loneliness, and academic failures due to “distance-learning”?
Maybe they were. But maybe if Biden’s FDA were a little bit honest, maybe they wouldn’t be holding a laboratory-tested and life-saving vaccine to a higher bar than our teachers unions or even our DMVs.
For the first time in history, we handed the reins of control to the most risk-averse people in the country, and if we ever hope to return to normalcy, it’s now abundantly clear that we’ll have to take that power back.
