Rare big problems may be indicative of common small problems.

Good point, I hadn’t considered this. Also there was the factory QA issue. Possibly much like in aviation , multiple small factors here that need to be addressed and they’re using this as easy excuse to put pause.

This is possible, but I work in medical research, and this pause is pretty standard practice. When there is a potential problem, you pause, gather more data, come up with a mitigation plan (if needed) and submit all this to the ethics authority (usually IRB). Its rote standard practice. And i think much more likely that they are following standard practice than there are hidden issues that haven't otherwise been revealed publicly yet.

That said, this is not a usual situation at all, and I think it's absurd, not least because of lives potentially saved during this pause, but because of the carry on effects with vaccine hesitancy, etc.

We can only guess, but I would imagine that pausing would show that issues were being taken seriously and reduce hesitancy. Compare:

- Government breaks standard practice in favor of J&J corporation, allowing sales to continue After These People Died!!1!

- Government pauses J&J vaccine, experts condemn them for extreme caution.

You'd replace an entire team due to one decision you didn't like?

Half a million Americans are dead. This is wartime. We don't have time to coddle bureaucrats who make awful decisions.

> This is wartime.

Wrong. In a war you win by outsmarting other people. Maybe that's through democracy, maybe it's by moving faster, maybe it's by having better technology, maybe it's by having more technology.

This is a pandemic. A health crisis caused by a virus. In this situation you win by carefully understanding the nature of the virus and then determining what needs to happen in order to shut it down. Making rash decisions because it's "wartime" doesn't actually stop the virus. We can't blitz a virus. We have to take time to understand the consequences of our actions.

> coddle

Actually, we do have to coddle. If we squash people's concerns about the vaccine, then they just won't get it because they don't feel listened to. On the other hand, if we show people that we're taking their concerns seriously, they're more likely to go and take one of the other vaccines. Because the "unsafe" ones were pulled after all, so the ones left over have to be safe (not true, but it's going to work for a non-trivial number of people).

I don't think you're appreciating the magnitude of the error here. This kind of complacency, typical of the public health bureaucracy, has led to a large net increase in death.

Perhaps one that costs half as much and only needs one dose...