White House says supply of other COVID vaccines is enough as new J&J guidance weighed

Michael Wilner
·3 min read

The Biden administration is working with states to reschedule appointments for individuals who were in line to receive shots of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine in the coming days, after federal agencies recommended a pause in usage over safety concerns.

Jeff Zients, coordinator of the White House coronavirus response team, said in a statement that the federal supply of other vaccines – produced by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna – was enough to continue vaccinating the country at a pace of 3 million shots per day.

“We are working now with our state and federal partners to get anyone scheduled for a J&J vaccine quickly rescheduled for a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine,” Zients said. “This announcement will not have a significant impact on our vaccination plan: Johnson & Johnson vaccine makes up less than 5 percent of the recorded shots in arms in the United States to date.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday recommended a temporary pause in use of the J&J vaccine after identifying six cases of a rare blood clot known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis – all in women under the age of 50 – out of a total 6.8 million distributed doses nationwide.

The J&J vaccine is a single-dose vaccine made with viral vector technology, a similar method used in the AstraZeneca vaccine that was similarly paused in Europe weeks ago due to scientists’ concern with a possible correlation to blood clots.

Those individuals developed blood clots in combination with low levels of blood platelets, a rare pattern that raised red flags among public health agencies, FDA officials said in a call with reporters.

“It’s plainly obvious to us already that what we’re seeing with the Jannsen [Johnson & Johnson] vaccine looks very similar to what was seen with the AstraZeneca vaccine,” said Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. “I can’t make some broad statement yet, but obviously they are from the same general class of viral vectors.”

Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director at the CDC, told reporters that the FDA’s advisory panel on immunization practices, known as ACIP, would review data on the J&J vaccine on Wednesday and provide a risk-benefit analysis.

“One of the things that the ACIP deliberation will do is review the data on the cases and the context of risk benefit, and possible subsets of the population that may be in different categories,” Schuchat said.

Another CDC official told McClatchy that ACIP has a variety of options before them.

They could determine that the number of known cases of vaccinated people with blood clots is statistically so low that it is worth resuming use of the vaccine. They could pause use of the vaccine entirely, pending further investigation of the cases.

They could also pause use of the vaccine in a certain demographic, such as women ages 50 and younger.

“We have a robust safety system in this country,” the official said. “It notifies us when there are potentially things going wrong, or issues we need to take a closer look at. The system has done that.”

Updates with FDA and CDC officials’ comments.

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