Does J & J ’s Covid‐​19 Vaccine Pose Fewer Risks than Oral Contraceptives?

Michael F. CannonEarlier today, I wrote about the U.S. Food and Drug Administration ’srecommendation that federal and state governments stop administering Johnson& Johnson ’s Covid‐​19 vaccine because the agency was “reviewing data involving six reported U.S. cases of a rare and severe type of blood clot …called cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST).” Here, I thought I would do a back ‐​of‐​the‐​envelope comparison of this risk to that of another category of products on which the FDA has not placed a hold: oral contraceptives.According to oneliterature review, the baseline risk of CVST among women is 3 per million per year and “the pooled odds of developing CVST in women of reproductive age taking oral contraceptives was 7.59 times the odds of developing CVST for those not taking oral contraceptives.” If so, the risk of CVST among oral contraceptives users is roughly 23 per million per year.In a recentwhite paper, my colleague Jeff Singer and I explain that oral contraceptives pose such large benefits and such low risks that American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and a majority of reproductive health care providers support making them available over the counter.Now let ’s consider the data on CVST and the J&J vaccine. Since the FDA acknowledges those six incidents occurred in a pool of “more than 6.8 million doses,”...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs