Fischhoff discusses Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause
The Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended a pause in the administration of the Johnson & Johnson single dose COVID-19 vaccine due to six cases of blood clots in women between the ages of 18 and 48. Nearly 7 million doses of the vaccine have been administered so far in the U.S.
The state Department of Health notified vaccine providers in the Commonwealth to temporarily halt distributing this vaccine.
How might the tone of the messaging from federal, state and local health officials impact the public’s reaction?
“It’s my sense that nothing is tested [for tone] that comes out of CDC,” says Baruch Fischhoff. He’s a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies public perception of risk and human decision-making. “People, in good faith, write things that make sense to them and then just put it out.”
The CDC is convening an emergency meeting today of the Advisory Committee on Immunizations Practices to further review cases for any details on the significance of this rare occurrence.
“My guess is that they think the public is more worried about vaccine safety than about not getting vaccines, and so they have set their threshold in that direction, but I don’t know what people think,” says Fischhoff.
“Unless you ask people how they interpret your messages, both your overt messages, what you put in the press release, and your actions, the decision that you choose to make, you don’t know what people think.”
Fischhoff says it’s the job of public health agencies to find out how the public interprets its actions.
