WATCH: Chris Hayes Questions Fauci on the ‘Risk Calculation’ That Went Into J&J Vaccine Decision
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes questioned Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday over the decision-making process and “risk calculation” that led the FDA and CDC to recommend a pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccines.
As Hayes noted in his opener, the concern here is blood clots in six people out of millions and millions of people who got the one-dose vaccine. He walked viewers through some of the vaccine science and said there’s reasonable arguments in favor of and against what the U.S. just did.
Fauci said that after the FDA and CDC became aware of these six cases, they made a determination to make a pause and “take a really close look at this” to see if there are any additional cases.
“You really want to alert the physicians out there, ‘Hold on, folks. We have an issue here. We’re going to try and sort it out. It may be nothing, we may go back to where we were before, but let’s just pause and take a really close look at this.’ That’s what this is all about,” he added.
Hayes noted how they’re making this decision out of an abundance of caution and said, “Every time I hear that phrase, I think, well, I don’t want an abundance of caution, I want the correct amount of caution. We’re fighting a deadly pandemic. So it matters how many shots get into arms. You and I, I think, agree on that.”
“And it matters whether people have the knock-on effect of reading this news and thinking, ‘Oh, my word, I don’t know about these vaccines.’ There’s stuff on the other side of the ledger here, you would, I think, agree,” he said.
Fauci said this kind of decision is “not at all unusual” but for understandable reasons people are paying more attention to it now.
Hayes dwelled a bit on the messaging issue and the responsibility of people with prominent platforms have to not spread bad or irresponsible information about vaccines.
“I think we’re trying to be very, very clear and responsible here on this program,, about what kind of risk we’re talking about and what it means more broadly. But how much the general picture of vaccine hesitancy, conspiracy theories about Bill Gates, yada yada, affects the overall picture or decision-making sphere in which all these folks are operating,” he said.
Fauci argued that this decision may help Americans because it reinforces that the primary goal is safety.
“Often when people are hesitant, they say, I’m not really sure that this was really carefully looked at, is it really safe. I think what you see happen today was the fact that safety was put right up front.”
You can watch the full discussion above, via MSNBC.
