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The Atlantic
The mRNA Vaccines Are Looking Better and Better
Concerns about blood clots with Johnson & Johnson underscore just how lucky Americans are to have the Pfizer and Moderna shots.
Katie Martin / The Atlantic
A year ago, when the United States decided to go big on vaccines, it bet on nearly every horse, investing in a spectrum of technologies. The safest bets, in a way, repurposed the technology behind existing vaccines, such as protein-based ones for tetanus or hepatitis B. The medium bets were on vaccines made by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, which use adenovirus vectors, a technology that had been tested before but not deployed on a large scale. The long shots were based on the use of mRNA, the newest and most unproven technology.
Don t panic over Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause, experts say. Chances of blood clot is less than 1 in a million. Adrianna Rodriguez, USA TODAY
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Health officials are urging Americans not to panic over news the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a recommendation Tuesday for states to pause vaccinations with the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine due to blood clots.
The agencies said they’re reviewing six reported cases out of nearly 7 million vaccines administered in the U.S., which makes these blood clots an “extremely rare” occurrence.
“This is a really rare event … It’s six out of the 6.85 million doses, which is less than one in a million,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said during a White House briefing Tuesday.
In the meantime, people who got the vaccine within the last three weeks should monitor for symptoms, including a severe headache, abdominal pain, leg pain or shortness of breath, and should seek medical care if these symptoms develop. Health experts say people who have been vaccinated longer than three weeks ago are in the clear.
“You’re OK,” Fauci said. “If you look at the time frame when this occurs, it’s pretty tight, from a few days to six to 13 days from the time of vaccination.”
He said symptoms from these types of blood clots are pretty noticeable, so Americans shouldn’t work themselves up questioning whether they may be experiencing them or not.
Amanda , 27, scheduled a routine vaccine appointment for her one-year-old in March 2020, the week after her husband’s planned spring break from work. The last thing she expected was that in that same month, the world would be upended when COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. In the early scramble of lockdown, Amanda called her pediatrician to reschedule her child’s vaccines for a later date. “Then more months went by,” she recalls, and she just kept putting it off.
Now, a year later, Amanda knows it’s time to get that appointment on the calendar. “He’s already had all his basic stuff: three rounds of Tdap (tetanus, diphtheria, and pertussis) and his MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella), so we’ve checked the major boxes,” she says. “I knew this other stuff his fourth dose of Tdap and the Hib (