The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention continues to investigate whether or not there is a connection between the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine and a rare blood clot disorder after a handful of people developed the disease after getting the shot.
Out of about 6.7 million people who received the vaccine, six women between the ages of 18-48 developed cerebral venous sinus thrombosis or CVST.
Those cases prompted the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration to recommend a pause on the vaccine, although the connection between the two is still not clear.
Dr. Rupali Limaye, scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says that when vaccines or any medications are undergoing clinical trials, any side event that participants experience gets recorded and is in included in the trial data.
“Some of the common ones that we hear are redness or swelling around the injection site, for example,” she said. “The reason that this has caused a pause is because no one in the clinical trials reported having any of this rare blood clotting disorder while they were in the trial.”
She says these types of pauses are not necessarily rare, and it does not mean that the vaccine itself caused these women to develop CVST.
“We don’t know if it’s related. But the way that our safety system monitoring works is that if there’s any side effects that was not articulated from the clinical trial, then there is a need to investigate to make sure, is there a correlation? Or is there a causation?”
While the disorder is rare, six cases out of nearly seven million people is not a higher rate than you would expect.
“If you take people, none of whom have gotten the vaccine, you still might get six cases out of seven million,” said Dr. Limaye. “This could just be coincidental.”
She says people should take comfort that this is being investigated, as it demonstrates the high safety standard required of any new vaccine or medication.
“It’s just really a measure of safety, to really, really make sure that there is no link between them.”
The CDC’s vaccine advisory committee continues to study the available data and will meet again this Friday to discuss their findings.
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