Officials: Conn. to resume J&J vaccine
Connecticut vaccination sites will resume administering the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, more than a week after the state halted the singledose vaccine amid concerns from federal regulators about rare but serious blood clots.
Deidre Gifford, the state’s acting commissioner of the Department of Public Health, announced the shots would resume in a statement Saturday.
“This pause and review will hopefully give people confidence that we take the safety of these vaccines very seriously and are committed to ensuring that that they meet the highest safety and effectiveness standards,” Gifford said.
The news comes a day after the
Food and Drug Administration said states could resume using the vaccine, shortly after a key panel advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to resume using it.
Federal regulators told states to pause administering the vaccine on April 13, after it was linked to a rare blood-clotting condition that in some cases proved fatal. Connecticut’s Department of Public Health quickly followed suit, ordering a pause on the use of the vaccine that same day.
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel of experts advising the CDC, recommended resuming shots because the risks from COVID-19 outweighed the danger from the blood-clotting condition. The vaccine was halted after six cases of the blood clots were reported from the 6.8 million people who had received the vaccine.
As of Thursday, 107,082 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have been administered in Connecticut, according to numbers shared by Gov. Ned Lamont’s office.
“With nearly a one-in-a-million chance of developing this rare adverse reaction to the J&J vaccine and no evidence of similar issues with the other two vaccines, Pfizer and Moderna, you are far more likely to become ill or be hospitalized with severe COVID than you are from getting vaccinated,” said Gifford.
The FDA has issued revised fact sheets for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for medical care providers and recipients warning of the risk of blood clots with symptoms to watch for.
But an official at the state’s largest hospital system suggested Friday they have enough of the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines to meet demand for shots without Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine.
“With Pfizer and Moderna we continue to have our eight mass vaccination sites going fully staffed and we have been able to meet the demand,” said Dr. Tom Balcezak, chief medical officer of Yale New Haven Hospital.
He said next week the sites will be able to begin taking walkup patients. “We are starting to see a lot more availability for appointments,” he said.
Several of the mobile vaccination vans targeted at underserved communities in the state had originally planned to use the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. The single-dose vaccine presented the advantage of not requiring patients to get a followup second shot, as in the case of the twodose regimen vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. State officials said at the time those vans would shift to use the twodose vaccines, but it’s unclear if plans have changed as a result of Saturday’s announcement.
That comes as some communities in Connecticut have more than or nearly half of residents fully vaccinated against COVID-19. In Lyme, a town of about 2,300 along the Connecticut River in New London County, more than 52 percent of residents are fully vaccinated, according to state figures.
Just across the river, the towns of Old Saybrook and Essex report nearly half of residents fully vaccinated, out of total populations of about 10,000 and 6,600, respectively. The town of Kent, which hugs the Housatonic River in western Litchfield County, reports similar statistics, with about 49 percent of its population of around 2,800 fully immunized.
But Connecticut’s largest cities are still lagging by comparison. In Hartford, less than 18 percent of the state capitols some 122,000 residents have been fully vaccinated, and a little more than 28 percent have received at least a first dose — both statistics below the state and national averages.
Bridgeport’s 144,000 residents are faring not much better, with less than 19 percent fully vaccinated, and just under 31 percent having received a first dose. Those stats again put the city below the state and national averages.
Communities with noted underserved populations by and large rank far lower on the list, when comparing cities and towns by the percentage of residents who have received a first shot or more.
As of Thursday, about 51 percent of Connecticut residents 16 and older have been fully vaccinated, Lamont noted during his news conference that day.
The governor pointed to statistics from Israel showing how hospitalizations for COVID-19 dramatically declined after the country reached about 50 percent of its population vaccinated.
“Hopefully we’re going to see something similar here in Connecticut,” he said.