Washington- When a 48-year-old healthy Nebraska woman came to the emergency room after three days of discomfort and abdominal pain, doctors discovered a life-threatening riddle. His platelets, the colorless blood cells that clump together to form clots, had collapsed. But a CT scan of the abdomen and pelvis revealed large blood clots, The Washington Post reported.
His medical team hurried to discover the seemingly paradoxical combination of symptoms. Even when the patient was treated with a regular blood thinner, several clots appeared in the brain and in the blood vessels around the liver and spleen.
While doctors were looking for clues in the patient’s medical history, a seemingly innocent fact emerged: he had received the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine two weeks before he began to feel ill.
Between March 19 and April 12, medical teams in Virginia and Nevada found the same astonishing constellation of symptoms in five other women between the ages of 18 and 48. They had all recently received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. A woman died.
Last Tuesday, US health officials recommended that these vaccines be discontinued so that experts can reconsider how or if the vaccine could be used safely. There have been only six known cases of more than 7 million injections, but the symptoms experienced by women have been alarming because they were severe and virtually invisible to healthy people, with one recent exception. They resembled cases in Europe among people who received a vaccine similar to the coronavirus developed by AstraZeneca and Oxford University.
Understanding the rare and possibly associated side effects after vaccination can be notoriously complicated, but in this case, US health officials have a plan. The work of European scientists in similar cases in March, coupled with decades of thorough research into an obscure immune response to heparin, the blood-thinning drug, gave them a likely, but not certain, mechanism just weeks after what cases have begun to develop. . detected.
There remain scientific questions about the component of vaccines that could trigger the reaction and who is at risk. But the syndrome is so similar to rare heparin-related reactions that scientists have given the vaccine-induced reaction a similar name, established a likely link, and identified a widely available diagnostic test. It is clear that heparin should not be given because it can aggravate clots, but there are other treatments on the shelves of almost any hospital, although they cannot repair the damage caused by severe clots.
In a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine on Friday, Johnson & Johnson scientists said “the evidence is insufficient to establish a causal relationship” between the injection and the clots and called for more evidence to clarify the symptoms seen in people who have been vaccinated. But many experts, including US health officials, said the immune explanation is the main theory.
On Monday, the director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Rochelle Walensky, said health officials are examining “a handful” of additional cases to judge whether they were the same rare reaction. Understanding the frequency of events will help inform decision-making about how the vaccine should be used.
“I am encouraged that there have not been an overwhelming number of cases,” Walenksy said.