“Don’t wear masks.” “No, no: wear masks.” “COVID kills over 10%.” “COVID kills less than 0.1%.” Once we realized the difference in makeup between the over-10% and sub-0.1% populations, we still couldn’t bring ourselves to make data-backed differentiations for many, many months (and still today have many small businesses closed or restricted based on what they do rather than the risk profile of their owners and employees).
These are difficult decisions to be sure, but when being seen as on the “safe side” confers benefits without a commensurate charge for the risk of the “safe” action, you get a society which moves in the direction of perceived safety (and where perceived safety may be strongly sub-optimal).
yes, security theater abounds. it's a multidimensional optimization problem with no absolutely safe side in the long run, only relatively, but often initially unintuitively, safer non-linearly intertwined sets of actions. it's hypocritical to discount the tiny risk of vaccines while dramatizing the tiny (but larger) risk of death by covid. further, it's myopic to look at the risks of covid in isolation (which is what all the frenzy around it has been doing for over a year) rather than in relation to all the similar risks in our lives and couching our responses now within our existing responses to those other ongoing risks.
How does one do that math ethically? There are risks if you do and risks if you don't. The FDA is the wrong group to make that call, because they're only concerned with the first kind of risk.
In Canada we reserved the Astra Zenica vaccine for people over 55 because of the blood clot issue. I think that's probably the right call.
I don't think the drug safety system is set up to effectively evaluate the cost/benefit of the pause itself in a pandemic scenario.