How Lamont jumped the shark
Dr. Ned Lamont, this week, had a Mayor of Amity moment.
Drawing on his years of medical training and clinical practice, Dr. Lamont said ...
What’s that?
You say Lamont is not a doctor? And that he has no medical training? Zero? No clinical experience? Nada? He knows bupkis about any of this?
My mistake. I just presumed that, because Lamont presumed to lecture and indeed rebuke the Centers for Disease Control about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause, he had some special knowledge. Apparently not.
Is there any way we could get his transcript from Phillips Exeter and see how he did in high school biology? Put Dan Haar on that story. Meanwhile: Bad Ned!
All government officials have a Mayor of Amity living inside them. They can’t help it.
The Mayor of Amity was named Larry Vaughn, and he appears in the science documentary “Jaws.” He was actually a pretty good mayor, shifted the town onto GAAP budgeting, synced up the four traffic lights, improved the wharf- to- hotel jitney service. I could go on.
But Vaughn will be forever known as the guy who said it was safe to go in the water when, in fact, there was an enormous shark on the Carnivore Diet marauding near the shore.
Ex- president Trump went full- on Larry Vaughn during most of his handling of the pandemic. The virus was not a big deal and would give up the ghost in a matter of seconds or minutes or days or weeks.
Lamont and many other sensible governors went in the other direction, and good for them. I still think Lamont gets good grades for his handling of this crisis, and the vaccination program in Connecticut has been the immunization equivalent of a beautiful white sandy summer beach.
But then the CDC tapped the brakes on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. And Larry Vaughn crawled into Ned’s skin.
Lamont and other governors were on a White House conference call Tuesday, the day the CDC and the FDA jointly announced their recommendation for a pause in administering the vaccine, because of very rare incidences of a blood called a Cerebral Venous Sinus Thrombosis ( CVST), following doses of the vaccine.
The Connecticut Mirror reported Lamont’s reaction to that news. “I would have handled it differently,” Lamont replied sharply. “And I let them know that.”
First of all, no one cares how the governor of Connecticut would have handled it. It’s not his job to handle it. He doesn’t know enough to make a smart decision, and if he thinks otherwise, the good press has gone to his head.
The pause had to happen because, frankly, nobody knows what’s happening here or how big a problem it is. The number you keep hearing, six cases in 6.8 million vaccinations, is probably low and definitely misleading.
Probably low for two reasons. First, the symptoms show up six to 13 days after vaccination. So there’s a large cohort of recently vaccinated people who don’t know yet whether they’ll have the ( still very rare) clots. It shouldn’t change the number drastically, but it could easily go from six to 12. Second, there may be another group of patients who had the symptoms but didn’t know they were meaningful. The CDC may very well hear from doctors who treated patients for clots but saw no reason to report them.
Why misleading? Because the symptoms have appeared only in women between ages 18 and 49. So six in 6.8 million may not be the right way to think about. Maybe you only want to count the vaccinated women from that age cohort, in which case it’s a much smaller pool. A woman between those ages getting the vaccine faces a much higher risk than one in a million. Probably still a low risk compared to a lot of things, but one in a million is misleading.
Now the other part. Nobody can say with any confidence that they understand why clots and this vaccine could conceivably go together. Medical research is in high gear right now, investigating possible explanations. The other vaccine with possible elevated incidence of blood clots is the AstraZeneca model, which is the other adenovirus “vector” platform. It might be a coincidence. For that matter, the whole clot scare may be a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.
And meanwhile — here is Lamont’s big fear — public confidence in those two vaccines has dropped. A recent YouGov poll showed a 13- 15 point swing away from trust in the
First of all, no one cares how the governor of Connecticut would have handled it. It’s not his job to handle it. He doesn’t know enough to make a smart decision, and if he thinks otherwise, the good press has gone to his head.
Johnson & Johnson vaccine. That might have happened anyway, on the strength of the news about the clots. You can’t really pin it on the pause, although, yes, the pause will probably make the number get even worse.
The YouGov poll did, however, show continued confidence in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which use mRNA platforms.
Here’s the other point that’s being overlooked. We’re vaccinating 3.3 million people a day. So Johnson & Johnson’s 6.8 million doses so far is a little more than two days’ worth of our national total. Meanwhile, a manufacturing error that had nothing to do with clots had stopped Johnson & Johnson in its tracks temporarily.
They weren’t that big a player, and they were out of the game for a spell no matter what. Meanwhile the other two companies are chugging right along.
If you want people to trust public health initiatives, this pause is exactly what you do. You tell people that you’re not taking any chances. Even though the risk is tiny, you’ll pause until you really have a grasp of what’s happening. You don’t speed past warning signs. If you do and then there is a real problem, you’ll never win back the lost trust.
Yes, the sun is shining, the needles are sharp, the beaches are clean, and the benefits are enormous. But, if you don’t mind, let’s send three guys out in a boat, just to be on the safe side.