Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine to be PAUSED after six women out of seven million people developed rare and severe blood clots - and one died
The FDA and CDC are recommending a pause in the US roll-out of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine after six women developed rare blood clots and one died after receiving the shot.
Seven million people in the US have had the one-shot vaccine. The percentage of people who have developed blood clots from it is 0.00008.
The two authorities are not revoking emergency authorization of it, but say they are recommending a pause in the administering of it until more data is collected.
It is now down to individual states to heed their advice and stop the roll-out, or carry on with it.
'We are recommending a pause in the use of this vaccine out of an abundance of caution.
'As of 4/12, 6.8m+ doses of the J&J vaccine have been administered in the U.S. CDC & FDA are reviewing data involving 6 reported U.S. cases of a rare & severe type of blood clot in individuals after receiving the vaccine.
'Right now, these adverse events appear to be extremely rare. Treatment of this specific type of blood clot is different from the treatment that might typically be administered,' the CDC and FDA said in a joint statement.
A medical professional from UofL Health administers a vaccine to a patient in their vehicle at University of Louisville Cardinal Stadium in Kentucky on Tuesday
They will hold a press conference at 10am EST to discuss the issue and a panel will convene on Wednesday too.
The company's shares decreased by 3 percent in early trading on Tuesday after the announcement.
Johnson & Johnson's vaccine was approved in the US on February 27 and it was given the greenlight by the World Health Organization in March, but it has not yet been approved by individual European countries like the UK.
In Europe, the roll-out of the AstraZeneca-Oxford vaccine has also been paused in some countries over similar concerns over blood clots.
Thirty people out of the 5million who received it developed the blood clots - a higher percentage of 0.0006.
Austria, Estonia, Latvia, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Romania, Denmark, Norway and Icveland, the Netherlands and Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Slovenia, Cyprus, Sweden all paused the vaccine.
The European Medicines Agency however said the rewards of the vaccine far outweighed the risk.
The vaccine has not been paused in the UK.
The shot has still not yet received FDA approval but Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country's leading infectious diseases expert, said it seems safe, and that it has not yet been rolled out in the US because there are so many other shots available.
I think that the AstraZeneca vaccine from a standpoint of efficacy is a good vaccine, and if the safety issue gets straightened out in the European Union... the efficacy of that vaccine is really quite good,” he told BBC radio on Tuesday.
'Whether or not we ever use AZ is unclear but it looks right now at this point in time that we will not need it. It’s not a negative indictment of AZ, it is just possible that given the supply that we have from other companies that we may not need to use an AZ vaccine,' he said.
