A health worker with the Johnson & Johnson (Janssen) vaccine in Boston, Massachusetts.JOSEPH PREZIOSO / AFP
A panel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States (CDC, in its acronym in English) has urged this Friday to resume the use of the vaccine from Janssen (a subsidiary of the Johnson & Johnson company). The decision of the health advisers comes two weeks after they recommended to stop its distribution due to the rare cases of thrombi detected: 15 confirmed cases among the almost 8,000,000 people who received the vaccine. The conclusion of the experts is that the benefits of the drug outweigh the risks of thrombus episodes. Now it is the Joe Biden Administration that must decide whether to adopt the recommendation.
Members of the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held an emergency meeting on Friday to discuss "very rare" cases of blood clots related to Janssen's vaccine. "The Janssen vaccine against covid-19 is recommended for people over 18 years in the US population under the FDA emergency use authorization," they reported after voting. The vote was 10 in favor, four against and one abstention.
Cases of thrombi were identified in 15 women who had received the drug, the majority under 50 years of age. Members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) concluded that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks of thrombus episodes. Following the recommendations, Johnson & Johnson wrote a label for the vaccine acknowledging that the link of blood clots to the drug is "credible."
This Tuesday the European Medicines Agency (EMA) confirmed the existence of a "possible link" between the Janssen vaccine and the, until then, eight cases of thrombi detected in the US after applying it to more than seven million people.
Endorsing that they added a warning on the labeling, they continued to recommend its use: "The overall relationship between risks and benefits remains positive."
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