What erodes confidence is the complete absence of cost/benefit discussions about virtually any decision that has been made. Including this one.
If this turns out to be about what it looks like now, unpause and go forward. If it turns out to be much more significant, all the better for having stopped; maybe restrict this vaccine to populations at higher risk of COVID or lower risk of blood clots (if that risk can be determined). Both mRNA vaccines and modified adenovirus vaccines are new types of vaccines not used before on a wide scale; pausing to get clarity on a major negative side effect is warranted.
A credible decision would give your estimates of harm/benefit for delaying vaccinating people. You seem all too willing to ignore the people who will become sick or die because of delaying the vaccine. You are only looking at potential harm from not delaying the vaccine. Unfortunately, you have a lot of company.
It seems to me that the delay imposed by a pause in use of the J&J vaccine to make sure healthcare providers are informed of and have appropriately updated diagnostic and treatment protocols is minor, its basically pulling forward by a few days the effects of the 80% week-over-week drop in J&J vaccine supply that was just in the news.
Leading to more people delaying their vaccination. Supply is currently at a level that all doses available are administered, but to the extent lost confidence results in longer delay for high risk patients, that has a cost. When supply exceeds demand, lost confidence will have a cost for those low risk people who delay, as well as the general population which loses out on wider immunity. Delaying the vaccine now certainly also has some cost of the same type, but it's bounded. Another case of a vaccine campaign ignoring warning signs and proceeding without pausing to consider appropriate response to issues as they arise will affect this campaign as well as future campaigns.
Suggesting that effects on the order of the ones seen here is a good reason to delay the vaccine should make people doubt the ability of our public health authorities to make reasonable tradeoffs.
[1] Michigan's Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer declared her state a "COVID hotspot" as cases continue to rise and has asked the federal government to increase vaccines in response. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/cdc-director-michigan-vaccin...
This is a low probability event, and the appropriate mitigation may be to do nothing; but there may be some common factor for these patients that might indicate use of a different vaccine or maybe informing people of symptoms of blood clots and what to do if they see symptoms.
The real risk here is eroding confidence in government health sources in general, and vaccines in specific. There were certainly unknown risks before, but now there is a known risk which deserves some study.