By Joseph Walker
Health officials around the country resumed offering Johnson
& Johnson's Covid-19 vaccine this weekend after getting a green
light from federal regulators on Friday.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and U.S. Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention lifted their recommendation to pause
the shots after investigating reports of rare but potentially
dangerous blood clotting in certain recipients. On Friday, FDA and
CDC officials said inoculations could continue because their
benefits outweigh their risks.
The FDA issued updated informational guides that inform vaccine
recipients and doctors of the risk of a blood-clotting side effect
that has primarily affected adult women under 50. The overall risk
is about 1.9 cases per million people, though the risk is about 3.5
times higher for women ages 18 to 49, officials said.
The Indiana Department of Health said it began administering the
J&J shot on Saturday to adults age 18 and up at a mass
vaccination site at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Florida
started offering the shots again on Sunday at federally-supported
vaccination sites in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville and Miami, said
the state's Division of Emergency Management.
A mass vaccination site at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, N.Y.,
opened appointments for residents to get the J&J shot on Sunday
after New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said that the city would
immediately restart using the vaccines.
Some officials said it could take a few days to schedule
appointments but welcomed the return of J&J's vaccine after
last week's pause sent states scrambling to reschedule thousands of
appointments.
"It does have some advantages over the other vaccines in
particular populations where it may be difficult to give them a
second shot," said Onisis Stefas, chief pharmacy officer at
Northwell Health. "We really need to have multiple options out
there to have people comfortable to get vaccinated so we can get to
herd immunity."
Pharmacy chains Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. and CVS Health
Corp. said they would restart vaccinations with the J&J shot
next week.
Arizona's health department said it had advised healthcare
providers in the state to resume offering the J&J shot, of
which the state has nearly 105,000 doses. The Minnesota Department
of Health said the state had distributed 9,600 doses of the vaccine
to healthcare providers that it expects to be available to the
public in the coming days.
J&J's shot achieves immunity with one shot rather than two
as required for Pfizer Inc.'s and Moderna Inc.'s vaccines.
J&J's shot is easier to keep refrigerated and for longer
periods.
States and hospitals are taking advantage of the simpler dosing
to vaccinate people who are less likely or able to return for a
second shot, such as the homeless, people who travel frequently for
business, and older people confined to their homes.
J&J's vaccine supplies aren't as plentiful as its rivals
because of manufacturing bottlenecks, but millions of distributed
doses have yet to be administered, according to CDC data, and are a
key tool to help speed the U.S.'s inoculation campaign.
Northwell will likely resume offering the J&J shot next week
once it updates the informational materials it provides to patients
to include a warning about blood clots and once it educates its
doctors and nurses on how to communicate the risk to patients,
particularly women under 50 years old, Dr. Stefas said.
Northwell, based in New Hyde Park, N.Y., had been using
J&J's shot primarily for people discharged from the hospital
and for nursing-home residents and plans to resume doing so next
week, Dr. Stefas said. The hospital will assess how much demand
there is from the general public before deciding whether to offer
the shot at its public vaccination sites, he said.
"Just because we offer it doesn't mean people are going to take
it," Dr. Stefas said. "We'll educate them on the risk, why the
pause occurred and see if people are comfortable with taking the
vaccine."
Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut hopes to restart offering
shots to patients being discharged from the hospital or who visit
the emergency room for conditions unrelated to Covid-19, said Chief
Clinical Officer Thomas Balcezak.
The hospital runs several mass-vaccination sites around the
state that are already booked next week with appointments to
receive the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, Dr. Balcezak said.
Public-appointment slots for J&J's shot will likely be made
available in the first week of May, he said.
Despite the blood-clot warning, J&J's shot will remain a
preferred choice for some people, said Dr. Balcezak. Informal
polling of patients and hospital staff after the past week's pause
showed that some people are more comfortable with the vaccine
because it doesn't use the relatively new messenger RNA technology
used by Pfizer and Moderna, Dr. Balcezak said.
"Some of our employees say, 'I just want to have the J&J
shot and be one and done,' or 'I like the idea that the technology
is not mRNA," Dr. Balcezak said. "There's a lot of hesitancy
regardless of the technology, so I don't know if this [pause] is
going to add to it or not."
Washington state could restart J&J vaccinations as soon as
this weekend pending a review of the latest FDA-CDC guidance by an
independent committee of experts, said Umair Shah, the state's
secretary of health. J&J's shots represented about 6% of all
vaccine shots administered in the state when shots were paused last
week; the state expects to receive an additional 8,600 doses over
the first two weeks of May, he said.
Dr. Shah said he doesn't expect demand for the vaccine to be
significantly less because the pause was short and the finding was
that the blood-clot risk is extremely rare. Some pharmacies have
reported receiving calls from patients requesting to be placed on a
wait list to receive the J&J shot once the pause was lifted, he
said.
"In general, this has not shaken confidence in the vaccine by
many in the community," Dr. Shah said. "And every bit is going to
help us, even a few thousand is helpful. People want it because
it's one shot and they're not as concerned about the safety
piece."
Write to Joseph Walker at joseph.walker@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 25, 2021 14:44 ET (18:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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