Expert: J&J pause could be lifted in a few days
HARTFORD — The pause on Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccine could end in a couple of days, predicted Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.
But, he said, even if the pause is lifted, there could be restrictions or recommendations about who could get the vaccine.
While Jha spoke on a number of topics related COVID-19 during a Wednesday webinar sponsored by the Hartford-based Travelers Institute, the public policy division of The Travelers Companies, Inc., a major point of discussion was the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. Federal agencies called for a pause on the use of the vaccine
Tuesday due to a rare blood clot in six of the 6.8 million patients who received it.
The decision on whether to continue using the Johnson & Johnson shot “was a close call,” said Jha, also former director of the Harvard Global Health Institute. Though the number of people who got the blood clots was small, he said it was wise for agencies such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control to stop and examine the seriousness of the risks.
“What they didn’t know was, were they looking at the tip of an iceberg, or were they looking at the whole iceberg?” Jha said.
His guess is that it will be safe to continue with the vaccine, but that officials might recommend that women 18 to 48 (the only group who got the blood clots after vaccination) avoid the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and instead seek the Moderna or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
Ultimately, Jha said, he hopes that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine can be used again. “It’s a fabulous vaccine,” he said. “It has a very high efficacy against what we care about, which is hospitalizations and deaths.”
When asked during the webinar about when things will return to normal, Jha was generally optimistic. He said that the country could be near the end of what he calls the “emergency phase” of the pandemic. However, Jha was quick to point out that he doesn’t think COVID-19 will ever be gone for good.
“This virus is probably one that will be with us forever,” he said. “(But) over the next few months, we’re going to see a real shift, where the virus is still a challenge and something to work on, but is no longer going to dominate our lives.”
There were a couple of issues that concerned Jha, including the fact that other countries, including India and Brazil, have not gotten as far in their vaccination efforts as the United States. “We need to get the world vaccinated and we need to get the world vaccinated soon,” he said.
He also expressed concern about the COVID variants, many of which are more contagious than the original. Jha said there is a “nightmare scenario” in which a variant emerges that renders the current vaccines useless, but he added that there’s an “extremely low likelihood” of that.
Ultimately, Jha said, he thinks the country is headed toward a good place, but people need to continue to be vigilant, and they need to get vaccinated if they haven’t already.
“We’ve all got to move beyond the pandemic and there really is only one way to do it, and that’s to get vaccinated,” he said.