Hannah Meisel
Despite shelving around 2,300 doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine Tuesday, the Sangamon County Department of Public Health won’t have trouble supplying planned vaccination clinics in the coming weeks, according to department director Gail O’Neill.
The county is following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Illinois Department of Public Health to pause the vaccine’s use as federal authorities investigate whether there’s a causal link between the vaccine and rare blood clotting reported in six people out of nearly 7 million Americans who got a Johnson & Johnson shot.
The Sangamon County health department had been using the single-dose shots to vaccinate residents in rural and other hard-to-reach communities with a mobile unit staffed by the Illinois National Guard. The department continued with its planned schedule of visits Tuesday, with a site set up at Abundant Faith Christian Center in Springfield, but used Pf
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Staff Report
The University of Illinois Springfield Innovation Hub, UIS Center for State Policy and Leadership and the Community Health Roundtable will host a public webinar “COVID-19 and the Health of the Community: Moving from the Old to the New Normal” at noon Friday.
The webinar via Zoom is free of charge.
In the webinar, panelists will discuss the baseline pre-COVID-19 health outcomes of people in Sangamon County; how social determinants of health, such as housing quality and affordability, have earned increased attention during the pandemic; and the trajectory of the pandemic in light of recent trends in health care practices, new COVID cases, vaccine administration and COVID-19 variants.
The use of the popular, one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine for preventing COVID-19 was temporarily halted Tuesday by state health officials because of six U.S. cases of a “rare and severe-type blot clot” among recipients of that vaccine.
A statement from the Illinois Department of Public Health said the department instructed all providers of COVID-19 vaccines in the state to immediately discontinue use of the J&J vaccine at this time “out of an abundance of caution.”
The department said the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines for COVID-19 make up the “vast majority of doses on hand” in Illinois. Those vaccines require two doses given several weeks apart to achieve full effectiveness.
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