The discussion here is mostly about the mRNA vaccines, and the J&J vaccine uses a viral vector like more traditional vaccines.
EDIT: For what it's worth I think you original question was fine to ask. There's a lot to know about here if you don't want to trust experts and take what they say at face value.
And if you look at the ICU numbers of Ontario, the indicator most touted as being proof the vaccine saves lives. The ratio of the ICU patients of the vaccinated/unvaccinated has been growing significantly.
If there is an advantage to being vaccinated. The numbers of the ICU unvaccinated patients are so small, 30 unvaccinated ICU cases per 15 million (Ontario Population) it would really be error prone to extrapolate to the general population from them. For example, it could easily be that 30 people out of a population 15 million are terminally ill with weeks to live, can't or won't take the vaccine then catch covid while being in the Hospital. This has no bearing on how a normal healthy person from the general population would react to COVID.
Ontario doesn't release data on death rates, so we don't know if the unvaccinated die at the same rate once in ICU. They probably don't.
If there is an advantage to being vaccinated at preventing death in absolute terms, it's tiny. The risk of dying from COVID is very small at this point to begin with.
My guess without have to do a bunch of reading and number crunching is that vaccinated people weren’t getting earlier variants but now when faced with a variation that the vaccine is poorly matched to, they’re getting sick but less so than someone who is COVID naive. However the unvaccinated in many cases have had COVID a few times. Many of these people were hospitalized in the past. Among that population there is a lot of natural immunity built up from infections from other variants, which may provide better protection against the latest covid than vaccines. But that’s all a wild ass guess.
[edit] I really don’t get why people are so animated by some cautious speculation, that’s presented as just that but don’t have anything to say in reply.
And even then, the J&J complications are so rare that no feasible amount of clinical testing would have ever uncovered them.
The FDA is right to pull the plug on it, because safer and better vaccines are widely available. But that should not be taken to mean that the J&J vaccine poses any considerable risk to patients, especially compared to those posed by exposure to COVID without a vaccine.
