PORTLAND, Maine — On Tuesday, the U.S. FDA and CDC recommended a "pause" of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine due to a rare blood clot reported in six women who were administered the shot. As of right now, one of those cases was fatal.
But what are the odds of dying from a J&J vaccine-related blood clot versus COVID-19 itself, based on your age?
Statistically speaking, the only way to compare this fairly is to compare the risk of contracting COVID-19 and then dying from COVID-19 to the risk presented from the J&J vaccine as we currently know it.
To accomplish this, we took the total U.S. COVID-19 deaths by each age group and divided by the population in the U.S. in that particular age group.
Note: CDC age data lags the current COVID-19 death count by almost 120,000, so we are slightly underestimating the risk of COVID in this graph. Also, population data is approximate to 2018.
What we end up with is that the risk of dying from COVID-19 is anywhere from 36 to 78,571 times HIGHER than the risk of dying from a J&J vaccine-related blood clot.