Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, makes remarks during a press conference with Jen Psaki, press secretary, at the White House in Washington, USA, on April 13, 2021.
Tom Brenner | Reuters
White House Chief Medical Officer Anthony Fauci said on Tuesday that the Food & Drug Administration’s recommended break over the use of Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine would give US health regulators time to thoroughly investigate how six women ‘ developed a rare blood clot. disorder that left one dead.
Fauci said that officials from the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention want to see if there are “any clues” and “can find some common denominators among the women involved” that may be the blood clotting disorder known as cerebral venous sinus can make. thrombosis, or CVST.
He also said the recommended break would make doctors aware of the problem. Doctors usually treat this type of blood clot with heparin, a blood thinner, but Fauci said it could be dangerous in this case, noting that health officials are recommending another treatment.
“If someone comes in with this really rare syndrome of thrombotic thrombocytopenia where you get thrombosis, the most common way to treat it is with heparin,” Fauci said in a White House newsletter. “It would be a mistake in this situation, because it could be dangerous and make the situation worse.”
Of the 120 million people in the U.S., about 6.9 million received J&J vaccine, Fauci said. It was noted that there were no “red flag signals” from the Pfizer or Moderna Covid-19 vaccines that depend on MRNA technology around their shots. Out of the 6.9 million people who got the J&J jab, he got blood clots, he said.
“We are fully aware that this is a rare event. We want to work it out as quickly as possible, and therefore you see the world quietly, in other words, you want to hold out a little bit,” Fauci said. . “We want to leave it to the FDA and the CDC to investigate it thoroughly. I don’t think it pulled the trigger too fast.”
Fauci said the break could last from a few days to a few weeks. The CDC will also convene a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Wednesday to further review matters.
During an earlier call Tuesday, dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s center for biological evaluation and research, said officials learned that blood clotting usually occurs about a week after vaccination, but no more than three weeks later, with an average time frame of 9 days.
“We know that for these vaccines, there are flu-like symptoms for the first few days after vaccination that can include headaches,” he said, adding that these are likely to be common side effects. ‘If someone is present in an emergency room with very serious headaches or blood clots, doctors should ask if they have recently received a vaccine before compiling a care plan. If the patient also has low blood platelets, doctors should consider that it may be related to the vaccine, he said.
He told reporters that researchers have not yet found a specific cause for the blood clotting in J&J vaccine recipients, but they believe it is similar to other adeno-viral vector vaccinations. “This is an immune response that occurs very, very rarely after some people have received the vaccine, and that immune response leads to the activation of the platelets and the extremely rare blood clots,” Marks said.