Recently the United States went through a tricky couple of weeks where use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for Covid-19 was suspended, and then reinstated.
The problem? Out of more than 7 million doses given, perhaps seven people got blood clots. Two of them died, although it’s not yet clear if those deaths were really because of the vaccine, or if some other factors contributed to their deaths.
Just to be clear, I am not pro blood clots.
And I don’t envy the job of the CDC. They had to figure out what to do given that the vaccine could absolutely save a lot of lives given how deadly Covid is. But then there’s the Do No Harm thing.
How does this relate to Daylight Saving Time?
The research is now crystal clear: When we set the clocks forward in the spring—robbing an hour of sleep from an entire population—people die. People die in traffic accidents. People have heart attacks and die. People have strokes and die. People die in workplace accidents. The list goes on and on.
A lot of people die in every country that has clock-changing.
And a lot more people are injured. I link on that research page to a new study showing that hospitalizations for just about everything go up in the days after the Spring Forward clock change.
So, here is the question, and the connection to the vaccine:
Let’s say that the J&J vaccine did kill those two people, and that those numbers hold up. That is, for every 3.5 million shots, one person will die.
Should they keep giving it out?
What the CDC is saying is that they should. The risk is worth it because of the chance of dying from Covid is so much higher. The risks vary, but if you spend more than 15 minutes in a room with other unvaccinated people, let’s say your chances of getting Covid and then dying are in rough numbers about 1 in 500.
So, the math works out to 1 in 500 vs. 1 in 3,500,000. In other words, you are 7,000 times more likely to die of Covid than to die from the Covid vaccine.
(And now that we know there’s a blood clot issue, especially for women aged 18-49, we can just say to that group that if you have a history of blood clots, maybe take one of the other two choices. Just doing that will likely drop the death rate by half or more.)
All very sensible.
Now let’s look at the Spring clock change.
The numbers of people who die because of heart attacks, etc., is not clear. The research shows an increase in death rates, but I haven’t seen a study that puts a number on it. With traffic deaths, however, one researcher did the math and figured out that on average there are 28 people that die in traffic accidents in the days after the spring clock change. So let’s use that number.
If we are going to take the CDC approach, we would need to weigh those 28 deaths against the benefits that come from changing the clock.
Here is where the argument for DST clock changing completely falls apart.
What is it that we get from changing the clock that makes it worth killing those 28 people? Really, name one thing.
With J&J, the math is, essentially, should we kill one person to save 7,000?
Using that math, changing the clock for daylight saving time would have to save 28X7,000, or nearly 200,000 people.
If we add in the deaths from heart attacks, etc., we are probably looking at DST needing to save a million lives every year to justify the human toll of the clock changing.
Does it? Does switching the clocks twice a year save a million lives?
I think you would be hard pressed to say it saves even one life. I mean really, why do we keep changing the clocks? Is there any reason other than the regular inertia of doing things the way they have always been done?
I will answer that question for you. There is none. There is no good reason to change the clocks.
Think of it like this: If we didn’t change the clocks, and someone went to the government and suggested that we should change the clocks twice per year, knowing what we know now there is absolutely positively no way it would get approved. I mean, just imagine someone arguing: Hey, I know this will kill a lot of people, and injure even more people, but think of the benefits! What are the benefits? Well, you know… The farmers!
Photo by Amogh Manjunath on Unsplash
You may have heard of the Trolley Problem. In short, you are running a trolley, and if you do nothing, the trolly will kill five workers. If you flip a switch, you will go on a different track and kill only one person. Do you do it? You still have to take an action that will kill a person?
For the J&J question, the trolly conductor essentially decided to flip the switch to take that one life in order to save about 7,000 lives.
For the Daylight Saving Time question, the trolly conductor (all of us) are essentially deciding not to flip the switch to move to the track that won’t kill anyone, and instead stay on the track that will kill dozens, perhaps hundreds of people every single year.
It’s time to flip the switch. It’s time to #LockTheClock