Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, makes comments at a press conference with press secretary Jen Psaki at the White House in Washington, USA, April 13, 2021.
Tom Brenner | Reuters
Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical adviser to the White House, said Tuesday that the Food and Drug Administration recommended break from using Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine will give U.S. health regulators the time they need. to thoroughly investigate how six women developed a rare blood clot. disorder that left a death.
Fauci said officials from the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention want to see if there is “any evidence” and find “some common denominators among the women involved” that could enable the blood clotting disorder known as cerebral venous sinus. thrombosis or CVST.
He also said the recommended break will make doctors aware of the problem. Doctors usually treat that type of blood clot with heparin, a blood thinner, but Fauci said it could be dangerous in this case and noted that health officials recommended a different treatment.
“When someone comes in with this rather rare syndrome of thrombotic thrombocytopenia where you get thrombosis, the most common way to treat it is with heparin,” Fauci said in a White House newsletter. “That would be a mistake in this situation, because it can be dangerous and make the situation worse.”
Of the 120 million people in the US, about 6.9 million have received J & J’s vaccine, Fauci said, noting there have been no “ red flag signals ” from the Pfizer or Moderna Covid-19 vaccines that rely on MRNA technology in making their shots. Of the 6.9 million people who received the J&J shot, 6 developed blood clots, he said.
“We are fully aware that this is a rare event. We want to work this out as soon as possible and that’s why you see the world standing still, in other words, you want to wait,” said Fauci. . “We want to leave that to the FDA and the CDC to look into this carefully. I don’t think it pulled the trigger too quickly.”
Fauci said the break can last from a few days to a few weeks. The CDC will also convene a meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Wednesday to further discuss the matters.
In an earlier call on Tuesday, Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said officials learned that blood clotting generally occurs about a week after vaccination, but no more than three weeks after, with a median time span of 9 days.
“We know that for these vaccines, there are flu-like symptoms, including headaches, in the first days after vaccination,” he said, adding that these are likely common side effects. “If someone comes to the emergency room with a very bad headache or blood clots,” doctors should ask if they have recently received a vaccine before developing a plan of care. If the patient also has low platelets, doctors should consider that it may be related to the vaccine, he said.
He told reporters that researchers have not yet found a specific cause for blood clotting in recipients of J&J vaccines, but they believed it was comparable to other adenoviral vector vaccines. “That’s an immune response that occurs very, very rarely after some people have received the vaccine, and that immune response leads to activation of the platelets and the extremely rare blood clots,” said Marks.