WASHINGTON – Surgeon General Vivek Murthy delivered a message on Friday afternoon to the 6.8 million Americans who received the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine and who have read in recent days about reports of blood clotting: ‘The high and overwhelming probability is that you just be good, ‘said dr. Murthy said during a briefing by the White House COVID-19 Response Team.
He added that the response team is confident in the claim, which is in line with what scientists know about the vaccine.
The government in Biden said on Tuesday that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine should no longer be used, after six reports of blood clots, including one death. Dr Anthony Fauci, a top scientific adviser to the Biden administration, urged people who had already received the vaccine to “pay attention” to possible symptoms of blood clotting, such as body aches or headaches.
Murthy’s reassurance to Johnson & Johnson recipients came moments after Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said an important advisory board would take another week to study the vaccine. The council, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, met earlier this week, but came to no conclusion, with one member requesting more robust information. ‘
The committee will meet again next Friday, Walensky said, giving it time to “review all additional matters that come in and conduct a full risk assessment and evaluate emerging science.” ‘
The Biden government finds itself in a challenging political and scientific mystery, hardly the first of the pandemic. Although the best experts have confidence in the vaccine, they go to great lengths to demonstrate that safety and transparency are paramount. The Trump administration has often been criticized for failing to comment on the pandemic, especially when it comes to politically inconvenient truths.
“We want people to know what we know,” Murthy said. “It’s your security system that works for you, what you’re currently seeing,” he added, expressing hope that “telling what’s going on” would create confidence in the American people. This can be a risky calculation, especially with conspiracy theories about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine multiplying rapidly on Facebook.
Murthy is relatively new to the information sessions of the response team, which mostly involved Fauci and Walensky.
The chief scientific advisers to the president agree with the general surgeon that the risk of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is vanishingly small, especially when compared to the looming risk of the coronavirus. Andy Slavitt, White House top scientific adviser, tried to put the issue of blood clotting in context, and said during Friday’s briefing that such cases are not only ‘incredibly rare’, but that it is essential to ‘in’ facing the fact that we have lost 560,000 Americans and that vaccines are saving lives. ”
A similar problem emerged in Europe last month after reports of blood clotting caused some countries to withdraw the AstraZeneca vaccine from rotation. The vaccine was similar to Johnson & Johnson designed using an adenovirus vector. The European Medicines Agency found that there were 86 cases of blood clots among 25 million people across the continent who received the AstraZeneca vaccine. It has called on countries to re-use the vaccine because, as the agency puts it, ‘the overall benefits of the vaccine to prevent COVID-19 outweigh the risks of side effects.’
The other two vaccines used in the United States – those developed by Moderna and Pfizer – use a different technology, called messenger RNA, which is not associated with cases of blood clots. After reports of the Johnson & Johnson cases first surfaced, Jeff Zients, coordinator of the coronavirus response in the White House, quickly pointed out that the two companies had 95 percent of the vaccine doses given to Americans so far. , and that the shortcomings in the distribution of Johnson & Johnson do not meet the Biden administration’s vaccination criteria.
The bigger concern is that the Johnson & Johnson break will be used by vaccine skeptics to question the vaccination effort more widely. It forces public health officials into a fine dance, like Friday, when they promised the fundamental safety of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, while also promising to follow what conclusions scientists will eventually draw themselves.
____
Read more from Yahoo News: