NEW YORK (WCBS 880) — The United States on Tuesday called for a pause on Johnson & Johnson vaccinations and while the news may sound alarming, experts say the pause is simply part of the process.
Dr. Purvi Parikh, an immunologist at New York University-Langone, says the blood clots currently being reported are extremely rare and should not cause panic.
“I'm telling people not to panic about this because still it's exceedingly rare,” she said. “It's about six cases out of 6.8 million and you know, these pauses are normal and expected when there's a rollout of any vaccine or drug. It's completely normal because when we start vaccinating millions of people, as opposed to thousands in the clinical trials, there's bound to be new issues that arise.”
CBS News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jon LaPook notes that given the data, there's a “less than one in a million” chance of developing the complication.
“It's a serious side effect, it's clotting and there was one woman who died but there were six cases out of 6.85 million doses that have been given in about the last six weeks since the J&J vaccine was authorized,” he said.
Dr. LaPook says the blood clots are specifically “a clotting of the veins that drain the face,” known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis. He says that while it is “a serious complication,” the CDC and the FDA are only telling people to be aware of it and monitor their heath if they’ve had the vaccine.
“If you receive the J&J COVID vaccine and develop severe headaches, abdominal pain, leg pain, shortness of breath within three weeks, they're saying after vaccination you should contact your health care provider or seek medical care but, people shouldn't panic about this,” he said.
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Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, at a press conference on Tuesday also addressed the pause, saying the information was made public to also make physicians aware of the side effects.
“If someone comes in with this really rather rare syndrome of thrombotic thrombocytopenic, where you get thrombosis, and when you have thrombosis the most common way to treat that is with heparin. That would be a mistake in this situation because it could be dangerous and make the situation much worse,” Fauci said. “So there's a clinically relevant reason why you want to make this known to people.”
Fauci continued, saying that people who got the vaccine weeks ago should not worry about developing side effects now.
“Someone who maybe had it a month or two ago would say, 'What does this mean for me?' It really doesn't mean anything, you're okay, because if you look at the timeframe when this occurs it's pretty tight from a few days, six to thirteen days from the time of the vaccination,” he said.
Fauci, LaPook and Parikh say researchers are studying the vaccine to look for answers and a new recommendation from the federal government should come soon.
“What will happen now is that the independent safety committees, FDA, CDC... will convene and look through everything to see is it just a link, a coincidence, or is the vaccine causing these issues and then try to determine if it's going to change how they recommend proceeding with the vaccination or not,” Dr. Parikh said.
She says she is confident in the process and thinks it’s a good thing that the nation has put a pause on the J&J vaccine because it “shows that all of those safety checks and balances are still in place despite the fact that we're in a pandemic.”
All three experts say they hope the Johnson & Johnson news does not make vaccine skeptics more hesitant. They are encouraging everyone to continue to get vaccinated, as the side effects from COVID-19 are much worse than those from the vaccines.
“There are concerns of course about vaccine hesitancy but, I think if you're sitting on the sidelines saying, ‘I'm gonna wait to see whether or not I should take a vaccine’ and you see that there's a monitoring system that picks up a complication that seems to be less than one in one million, that's very reassuring because if you get COVID-19 the odds of having a complication are way, way, way higher than one in a million,” LaPook said.
Experts are advising patients not to worry about the common side effects after a COVID-19 vaccine, including arm pain and flu-like symptoms.
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