Some states resume use of J&J shot
Moves come quickly after pause on 1-dose vaccine is lifted
NEW YORK — With a green light from federal health officials, several states resumed use of the one-shot Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine on Saturday. Among the venues where it was being deployed: the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Among the other states ordering or recommending a resumption, along with Indiana, were Arizona, Colorado, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New York, Tennessee and Virginia.
Those moves came swiftly after U.S. health officials said Friday evening that they were lifting an 11-day pause on vaccinations using the J&J vaccine. During the pause, scientific advisers decided the vaccine’s benefits outweigh a rare risk of blood clot.
“The state of New York will resume administration of this vaccine at all of our state-run sites effective immediately,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said in a statement Saturday morning.
“The vaccine is the weapon that will win the war against COVID and allow everyone to resume normalcy, and we have three proven vaccines at our disposal,” Cuomo said, urging New York residents to take whichever one is available to them first.
The Indiana Department of Health announced resumption of a free COVID19 mass vaccination clinic Saturday at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, offering the J&J vaccine to anyone 18 or older. The clinic will be operating at least through Friday, when there will be a family vaccination day at which 16- and 17-year-olds also can be vaccinated.
“I can’t think of a better way to welcome the month of May in Indiana than getting your vaccine this week at the Yard of Bricks,” said Dr. Chris Weaver, chief clinical officer for Indiana University Health, which is partnering with the state in running the speedway clinic.
Virginia health officials also told providers to immediately resume their use of the J&J vaccine.
“This extra scrutiny should instill confidence in the system that is in place to guarantee COVID-19 vaccine safety,” said Dr. Danny Avula, the state’s vaccine coordinator. “As with any vaccine, we encourage individuals to educate themselves on any potential side effects and to weigh that against the possibility of hospitalization or death from COVID-19.”
Avula received the J&J vaccine himself on April 1.
In Michigan, where local health departments have a key role in vaccination decision-making, the state’s chief medical executive, Dr. Joneigh Khaldun, recommended resuming use of the J&J vaccine.
In Los Angeles County, the nation’s most populous county, public health officials told vaccine providers they could resume administering J&J doses on Saturday, as long as they provided an updated fact sheet to recipients.
Dr. Paul Simon, chief science officer for the county’s Department of Public Health, said the county has been working on developing additional materials to explain the clotting issue that prompted the pause.
Those will “include what we think is really important information about what to look for — the signs and symptoms if you were to have this, again, very rare reaction,” he said. “And we are going to underscore that this is a very rare reaction.”
The federal government uncovered 15 vaccine recipients who developed a highly unusual kind of blood clot out of nearly 8 million people given the J&J shot. All were women, most under age 50. Three died, and seven remain hospitalized.
Meanwhile on Saturday, Indian authorities scrambled to get oxygen tanks to hospitals where COVID-19 patients were suffocating amid the world’s worst coronavirus surge, as the government came under increasing criticism for what doctors said was its negligence in the face of a foreseeable public health disaster.
For the third day in a row, India set a global daily record of new infections. The 346,786 confirmed cases over the past day brought India’s total to more than 16.6 million, behind only the United States, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The Health Ministry reported another 2,624 deaths in the previous 24 hours, pushing India’s COVID-19 fatalities to 189,544. Experts say even those figures are likely an undercount.
In a sign of the desperation unfolding over the shortages, a high court in Delhi warned Saturday it would “hang” anyone who tries to obstruct the delivery of emergency oxygen supplies, amid evidence that some local authorities were diverting tanks to hospitals in their areas.
In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel has urged Germans to accept nationwide pandemic restrictions that took effect at midnight, resulting in a 10 p.m.-to-5 a.m. curfew and further limits on personal contacts and access to nonessential stores in regions with high infections.
In her weekly video address Saturday, Merkel acknowledged that the new rules are “tough” but insisted they are needed to curb the spread of the virus in the country.
Since the start of the pandemic, Germany has recorded almost 3.3 million cases and 81,5142 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins.