Nurse Nicole McCurrach (48) vaccines coronavirus (COVID-19) at Richmond Racecourse in Richmond, Virginia, USA, March 4, 2021. REUTERS / Julia Rendleman / File Photo
(Reuters) – The United States is reviewing reports of a handful of possible cases of serious side effects among people who received the COVID-19 vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, in addition to those that led to an interruption in its use, a top U.S. public health official said Monday.
U.S. health regulators last week called for a halt in the administration of the J&J vaccine due to reports of severe blood clots in the brains of six women under the age of 50 who were shot out of about 7 million in the United States with it. vaccinated.
“We are encouraged that there have not been an overwhelming number of cases yet, but we look and see what came in here,” Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said in a newsletter Monday. said.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is monitoring the U.S. government’s database for additional side effects reports, she added. Walensky did not provide any details on the nature of the additional side effects.
An advisory panel for the CDC is meeting Friday to review data on serious side effects and will make a recommendation on whether the United States should resume the J&J vaccine.
Public health experts predicted a resumption, but only after healthcare providers gave clear guidelines to recognize and treat the blood clots that can occur as a rare side effect of the vaccine.
J & J’s COVID-19 vaccine production may continue to move more slowly than originally projected. The FDA has postponed the authorization of a major J&J vaccine in the United States due to manufacturing defects that destroyed millions of doses last month.
Andy Slavitt, White House COVID-19 adviser, assured Americans on Monday that the supply of vaccines remains robust and that it has never been so easy for Americans to get a vaccine. More than 3 million COVID-19 shots go into the United States every day using the Pfizer Inc / BioNTech and Moderna Inc dual-dose vaccines.
More than 260 million COVID-19 shots were fired in the United States and nearly 210 million people received doses, according to CDC data last updated Sunday.
Walensky said that of the 84 million people who were fully vaccinated in the United States, less than 6,000 became ill with COVID-19 more than two weeks after they were fully administered. Of those, nearly 400 were hospitalized and according to CDC data, about 75 died. Some hospitalizations and deaths were not due to COVID-19 infections.
“It still makes a very important point. These vaccines work,” Walensky said.
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