Damage is done... NYC saw a drop in vaccine appointments right after the original ban on J&J happen.
They could have issued a warning first, with the group ages/sex that they were seeing the clots (it was mostly women). Now they are scaring the 'indecisive' part of the population, and just making sure the pandemic will keep going.
Both the CDC and the FDA have completely dropped the ball during this pandemic. They are acting like typical bureaucrats, with the 'you don't fired if you buy IBM' type of mentality, and instead of being aggressive, they are just acting in a way so they don't get fired.
They should have done challenge trials back in April last year, and ask for military style of mobilization on productions, instead of just doing the normal/usual trails.
It would have speedup the vaccine rollout even more, and perhaps save at least 200k lives or more. (mask requirements on the Federal level, would have saved another 100-200k people).
I think a mask mandate on the federal level would have required using more emergency presidential powers than most people would have been comfortable with. A president exercising martial law or something similar that would allow increased power over the states during a presidential election might not be helpful for people's view of the procedures and result.
It's unclear that federal mandates would even have been constitutional and compliance, even in blue states in situations like people walking at comfortable distances outside are pretty spotty. There's a lot of faith in the idea that different top-level policies would have made a big difference short of truly sealing borders and having them totally shut even now.
Polling shows that pausing the J&J vaccine did not make people more hesitant to get vaccinated. https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/04/poll-shows-jj-pause-... It might have made the locations and times less convenient, or people might be waiting for a one-shot vaccine.
Vaccines take multiple years to develop normally. How much faster can you get for vaccine development? I certainly did not expect there to be more than one, or any, good options for vaccination by the beginning of this year. The trials also helped make it clear that the Pfizer–BionTech and Moderna vaccines were safe, something that will help convince people to take the vaccine in the long term.
They could have issued a warning first, with the group ages/sex that they were seeing the clots (it was mostly women). Now they are scaring the 'indecisive' part of the population, and just making sure the pandemic will keep going.
Both the CDC and the FDA have completely dropped the ball during this pandemic. They are acting like typical bureaucrats, with the 'you don't fired if you buy IBM' type of mentality, and instead of being aggressive, they are just acting in a way so they don't get fired.
They should have done challenge trials back in April last year, and ask for military style of mobilization on productions, instead of just doing the normal/usual trails.
It would have speedup the vaccine rollout even more, and perhaps save at least 200k lives or more. (mask requirements on the Federal level, would have saved another 100-200k people).