Day 686: Nine Deaths per Atlanta

Here at PlagueBlog headquarters, we thought we'd be blogging more of your usual COVID chaos today, but instead we have the CDC unexpectedly backing down on Johnson & Johnson and a surprise Pfizer trial failure.

PlagueBlog doesn't take the claim of nine deaths from J&J seriously; estimates based on VAERS data put the COVID vaccine death toll somewhere above 9 deaths per half hour, with about one of those due to J&J and the other eight due to the mRNA-based vaccines. Steve Kirsch puts the estimate even higher, at 388,000 total deaths in the US, based in part on his old estimate of at least 150,000 and also on new data from "Wayne at VAERS Analysis" (whose own estimate is 407,831).

Sadly, Pfizer's trial issues may not lead to a welcome delay in unnecessarily jabbing the children:

[Pfizer] said on Friday that its study in children between the ages of 2 and 4 who were given two 3-microgram doses of the vaccine found it did not create the same immune response that a larger dose of the vaccine had in older children.

The 3-microgram dose did generate a similar immune response in children aged 6 to 24 months, the company said.

The company said it will now test a three-dose course in both age groups, as well as in older children. It had previously expected data from 2- to 4-year-olds this year, but said it did not expect the delay would meaningfully change plans to file for emergency use authorization in the second quarter of 2022.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up seven tenths of a percentage point today.