America’s temporary halt to the use of Johnson and Johnson’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine will not interfere with President Joe Biden’s goal of bringing the country back to normal by Independence Day, the dean of the Brown University’s School of Public Health said Tuesday.
“I think it’s going to be a blip on the calendar in terms of vaccinating Americans,” said Dr. Ashish Jha said. “I do not think it’s going to affect the timeline at all.”
Federal health agencies on Tuesday advised the US to temporarily suspend the use of J & J’s single-dose vaccine after six women out of the approximately 6.9 million people who received the shot developed severe blood clots. The blood clots occurred in women between 18 and 48 years of age. One woman is dead and another is in critical condition. They all developed symptoms 6 to 13 days after they had the chance, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Food and Drug Administration.
Jha told CNBC’s ‘The News with Shepard Smith’ that the warning measures are proof that ‘the system is working’, and that the government’s swift action could counter the vaccine’s hesitation.
“My hope is that it will actually build trust in people that we do not take adverse events lightly, and that we investigate them, and that we really make sure that these vaccines are very, very safe.”
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, reaffirmed that the break comes “from an abundance of caution” and that it will give health officials time to investigate.
“You want to make sure safety is the most important issue here,” Fauci told a White House news conference on Tuesday. “We are fully aware that this is a very rare event. We want to work it out as quickly as possible.”
Jha told the host, Shepard Smith, that he ‘expects the break to last the last few days, not much longer’, and that Fauci’s claim reflects on the rarity of the blood clots.
“The key point here is that this is an incredibly rare, unfavorable event,” Jha said. “It’s not going to affect a lot of people at all, and I just think, out of an abundance of caution, we’m just taking a break to see what else we can find out about it.”