A decision on whether to resume use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine could come as soon as Friday, Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told CBS.
Fauci added that he would not be surprised if there is a”resumption in some form.”
“I don’t know if there have been further cases. We will know that by Friday, and I would be very surprised if we don’t have a resumption in some form by Friday. A decision almost certainly will be made by Friday,” Fauci said.
US health regulators recommended last week that use of the J&J vaccine be paused after reports of six cases of rare brain blood clots in women, out of some 7 million people who have received the shot in the United States.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory panel is set to meet on April 23 to discuss the next steps for the vaccine.
Fauci said he does not know what the final decision will be, but he said there are a few possibilities.
“One of the possibilities would be to bring them back, but to do it with some form of restriction or some form of warning. But I believe by Friday, we’re going to know the answer to that,” he added.
J&J scientists refute case report
Scientists at Johnson & Johnson on Friday refuted an assertion in a major medical journal that the design of their COVID-19 vaccine, which is similar to AstraZeneca’s, may explain why both have been linked to very rare brain blood clots in some vaccine recipients.
The United States (US) earlier last week paused the distribution of the J&J vaccine to investigate six cases of a rare brain blood clot known as cerebral venous sinus thrombosis (CVST), accompanied by a low blood platelet count, in US women under age 50, out of about seven million people who got the shot.
The blood clots in patients who received the J&J vaccine bear close resemblance to 169 cases in Europe reported with the AstraZeneca vaccine, out of 34 million doses administered there.
Both vaccines are based on a new technology that uses a modified version of adenoviruses, which cause the common cold, as vectors to ferry instructions to human cells.
The US Food and Drug Administration is scrutinising this design behind both vaccines to see if it is contributing to the risk.
In a letter on Friday in the New England Journal of Medicine, J&J scientists refuted a case report published earlier this week by Kate Lynn-Muir and colleagues at the University of Nebraska, who asserted that the rare blood clots “could be related to adenoviral vector vaccines.”
