When I heard the news that Johnson and Johnson's COVID vaccine was getting pulled from distribution, I felt myself cringe.

The FDA and the CDC called what they were doing, a temporary pause.

But by the time the nightly news broadcasts were on the story, this pause, it felt like a screeching halt.

Tonight, the major vaccine news, why did the government pause the use of Johnson and Johnson's COVID shot?

Appointments for the one-shot vaccine canceled in all 50 states after six women developed blood clots.

One of them dying.

The reporting was that six people, all of them women, had been diagnosed with a rare blood clot in their brains.

I called up science writer Tara Haley because I wanted someone to reframe this news for me.

Help me see it in a way I couldn't.

I mean, when these vaccines

got released for COVID, I wonder if you were sort of expecting this day would come.

Yes, I was. And I wasn't the only one.

I mean, we're giving out a vaccine to what's ultimately going to end up being, what, like, I don't know, 280, 300-something million people just in the United States alone.

The odds of something not happening are smaller than the odds of something happening.

You could have all the time in the world, and you could never produce a product that's not

going to have an adverse reaction in some people. It doesn't matter whether you're

designing a food, a drug, a vaccine, anything that you're going to put into your body.

It's basically, I mean, I don't even know if it's possible. Water, does water count?

We're made of water, so it doesn't count. So it's like almost anything will hurt someone.

Peanut butter to me is delicious to a bunch of other folks. It's deadly. It's deadly, exactly.

In some ways, listening to you talk, it sounds like what happened here makes you feel more safe. It does, actually. They stopped everything on a dime

immediately to say, let's investigate this. Let's see what's going on here. Let's see what we can find out.

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