Washington – Dr Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to President Biden, said on Sunday he believed it would be decided whether to suspend the use of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccination by Friday.
“A decision will almost certainly be made by Friday,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview on Face the Nation. “I do not really foresee that they will somehow want to stretch it a little longer, and decide on J&J. I do not know what it will be, but think about what the possibilities are, one of the possibilities is “to bring it back, but to do it with some restriction or some warning. But I believe by Friday we will know the answer to that.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week jointly recommended a temporary “pause” over the use of single-dose vaccine Johnson & Johnson after six women reported a rare blood clotting disorder has. The women, between the ages of 18 and 48, experienced symptoms six to 13 days after receiving Johnson & Johnson’s shot.
Federal officials, including Fauci, stressed that the adverse effects are incredibly rare, but said those who received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine should be aware of symptoms such as severe headaches, difficulty moving, chest discomfort and breathing problems.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine represents a small fraction of the approximately 190 million doses administered when the US health authorities requested it last week. The White House said it was not expected to have an impact on President Biden’s vaccination plan, as the government had secured enough doses of vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna to maintain the rate of vaccinations.
While a CDC advisory committee met last Wednesday to discuss the vaccination of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, its members did not vote on whether the break should be extended, citing insufficient data to make final recommendations.
Fauci said there may be gender restrictions on the use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 shot, but insists the diseases have so far been seen in only six people out of millions of recipients. He also noted that there are cases of rare blood clots with AstraZeneca’s vaccination against coronavirus in the European Union and the United Kingdom that are not restricted to women.
“This is one of the points we want to be careful about,” he said. ‘So you do not want to jump in and decide that you know the full spectrum of this. That is one of the reasons why they stopped and hopefully we will know by Friday. ‘
The disruption of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has raised concerns that it could lead to more hesitation about vaccines, but Fauci stresses that each of the three FDA-approved vaccines – from Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson – is extremely effective.
“The one thing we need to emphasize when dealing with safety is that people should not extrapolate a break with one vaccine to the other vaccines,” he said. “For example, the same surveillance system that the six women in the J&J picked up was the same surveillance system that the CDC and the FDA used with the Moderna product and with the Pfizer product. So far, there have been no red flags of that, though, you know there are tens and millions and millions of people vaccinated with the vaccines, so one of the things you can take away from all of this is that when the surveillance system, the CDC and the FDA say something is safe, you can be sure it’s safe. ‘
The US has administered between 3 million and 4 million doses of coronavirus vaccines daily, and nearly 206 million shots have been fired so far. Nearly 40% of the total U.S. population has received at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, according to the CDC.
To keep the infection rate low, Fauci said it was crucial to continue the current vaccination rate, adding that mitigation measures should not be facilitated at this time, as the US still has between 60,000 and 70,000 new infections per day report.
“It would, I think, really not be wise at all to declare victory prematurely and withdraw,” he said. “If we continue to vaccinate more and more people every day, it will undoubtedly decrease if we do not give the virus the opportunity to essentially rise.”
Fauci said that if Americans ” stay in there a little longer, I believe we’ll be right. ‘
“We will reach the point where we will again be able to do things as we did before,” he said. “But we will have to make sure we get as many people vaccinated as possible.”
Fauci predicted that by the end of the summer, Americans would know if they needed a boost shot to protect against new coronavirus strains.