State has J&J vaccine stockpile
Connecticut has 125K doses with no plans to order more
Connecticut is sitting on a stockpile of 125,000 doses of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccine, officials said, with demand for the vaccine remaining low following a 10-day pause.
“We’re not ordering more from the federal government,” said Josh Geballe, Gov. Ned Lamont’s chief operating officer.
U.S. authorities lifted a 10-day pause in administration of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on April 23 after a review was conducted of six rare blood clotting cases involving people who had recently been given the vaccine. That week, Connecticut administered 268,460 vaccines, according to state data.
Since the pause was lifted, Geballe said Connecticut has administered about 1,000 doses a day of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
On Monday, the state said that a total of 113,915
Johnson & Johnson doses had been administered, only 5,497 more than had been administered a week before. The state has been allocated more than 100,000 doses since the pause was lifted.
“It's tainted,” said Yale New Haven Health’s director of infection prevention, Rick Martinello, of the public perception of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. “Once that well is poisoned, it's very tough to point people in the other direction.”
Dr. Ohm Deshpande, in charge of Yale New Haven Health’s vaccination efforts, said the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been a hard sell.
“A 10 to 15 percent hit rate would be charitable,” he said. “It’s not nobody who is saying yes, but it’s fewer. When we open the mass vaccination sites to Johnson & Johnson, the uptake is really, really low.”
The Biden administration announced Tuesday that any unordered vaccine will be redistributed to states who want it, allowing those states to order 50 percent more than their standard allocation, as the Washington Post reported.
“To my knowledge, we still have not had one of those cases in Connecticut,” Deshpande said of the blood clotting cases that led to the pause. “It’s a shame,” he said, that the vaccine was being unused.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said after the pause was lifted that the risk of death from COVID-19 far outweighed the risk of blood clotting resulting from the vaccine.
“If the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine were no longer available, excess COVID-19 cases and deaths could occur,” the CDC said.
Martinello said that CDC report demonstrated “how hard it is for people to get statistics and to understand what those trade-offs are, and the relative risks between two different things.”
He added: “They showed that while there may be a small number, a handful of people who develop cerebral thrombosis, and maybe a very small number to zero who die, it would save hundreds to thousands of lives by preventing COVID very widely.”
Kim Metcalf, who runs UConn Health’s vaccination program, said that as a one-shot vaccine, Johnson & Johnson has some significant benefits.
“J&J does have much better stability, a much better storage capability,” she said. “It is a single shot, there is convenience around that, convenience as to the time of efficacy, convenience to being able to reach individuals who may not be able to return for boosters.”
Geballe said there may be uses for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the future. The one-shot vaccine had been much touted for use in settings where two doses a month apart might be difficult.
For example, Geballe said the Johnson & Johnson vaccine would be particularly valuable with home-bound patients, or for other individuals who could not make it to a vaccination site.
“I’m sure there will continue to be a use for it,” he said.