America’s temporary break in the use of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine will not interfere with President Joe Biden’s goal of bringing the nation into a semblance of normalcy by Independence Day, said Brown University School of Public Health .
“I think this will be a blip on the timing of vaccinating Americans,” said Dr. Ashish Jha. “I don’t think it will affect the timeline at all.”
Federal health agencies said Tuesday that the United States should temporarily discontinue the use of the J&J single-dose vaccine after six women in about 6.9 million people who received the shot reported severe blood clots. Blood clots occurred in women between the ages of 18 and 48. One woman died and another was in critical condition. They all developed symptoms 6 to 13 days after receiving the chance, accordingly 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 works” and that the government’s swift actions can counteract the vaccine’s hesitation.
“My hope is that it will actually increase people’s confidence that we don’t take side effects easily 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 will give health officials time to investigate.
“You want to make sure safety is an important issue here,” Fauci told a White House news briefing on Tuesday. “We are fully aware that this is a very rare event. We want to resolve this as soon as we can.”
Jha told host Shepard Smith that “the break is expected to last for days, not much longer” and echoed Fauci’s statement about the rarity of blood clots.
“The key point here is that this is an incredibly rare, adverse event,” Jha said. “It won’t affect a lot of people at all and I think, out of an abundance of caution, we’re just taking a break to see what else we can learn about it.”