J&J Vaccine Pause Will Have Little Effect On CT's Rollout: Lamont

CONNECTICUT — Gov. Ned Lamont said Tuesday the pause in Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccinations is no cause for alarm.

"There have been six severe side effects out of 6.8 million J&J doses that have been administered in the United States over these many months," Lamont said during a news conference. "That's a one-in-a-million chance of having a severe side effect."

The announcement followed a recommendation Tuesday morning from the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control that Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccinations be paused because of concerns about cerebral blood clots. Six cases occurred among women between the ages of 18 and 48, officials said.

The CDC will convene a meeting of its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices on Wednesday to further review the cases. The FDA will review that analysis as it also investigates these cases.

To date, around 100,000 Connecticut residents have received the J&J vaccine with no reported adverse reactions, according to the state Department of Public Health.

Lamont said he did not think the pause on the J&J vaccine distribution, which he estimated will last less than a week, will hurt the state's final phase of its vaccine rollout. Connecticut is currently administering the vaccine to everyone 16 and older. Vaccine supply is still scheduled to outpace demand in the state before the end of April, according to the governor, and he is advising providers to hang on to the J&J doses they already have.

"The good news is we are going to get extra doses next week of Pfizer and Moderna, so hopefully we're not going to miss a beat," Lamont said, adding shipments of those vaccines will increase between 7 and 8 percent.

The governor said he was less concerned about the effect the pause will have on vaccine supply than he was on vaccine demand, given the level of "vaccine hesitancy" in the state.

"Everything in life carries some level of risk," said acting commissioner of the Department of Public Health Diedre Gifford. "We know the risk of COVID is real. We've lost 7,000 people in Connecticut to COVID. We haven't lost anybody to this particular side effect of the J&J vaccine."

Gifford said she was unaware if any of the six cases suffering severe side effects were from Connecticut. She emphasized that, although the cases have been associated with the J&J vaccine, there is no medical or scientific relationship yet known between the vaccine and the newly reported side effects.

Residents who have received the J&J vaccine more than two weeks ago are in no danger from the severe side effects, according to Gifford.

"If you are someone who has received the J&J vaccine in the last couple of weeks, you can also be comfortable that this is a very, very rare event," Gifford said, but noted that experiencing headache and low-grade fever shortly after receiving the vaccine was a common side effect for all the vaccines. The new, rare effects occurred between six and 13 days following the J&J jab.

People who have received the J&J vaccine who develop severe headache, abdominal pain, leg pain, or shortness of breath within three weeks after vaccination should contact their health care provider, the CDC is advising.

Connecticut Chief Operating Officer Josh Geballe said there will "likely will be some cancellations" in store for residents who have appointments for J&J vaccines scheduled in the very near future, but providers are working to reschedule these using the Moderna or Pfizer brews.

The J&J pause throws a bigger monkey wrench into the works of the mobile vaccination units, which are the current priority, according to Geballe. The logistics of their deployment into areas of high social vulnerability relied to a great degree upon the vaccine needing just one dose, unlike the mRNA vaccines now replacing it, if only temporarily.

"It will take a couple of additional weeks for those people to be fully vaccinated," Gifford said.