Europe’s drug regulator said Tuesday that it’s recommending a warning be added to the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine about a possible link to blood clots, but noted they are “very rare” and the benefits still outweigh the risks.<\/p>\n
In response, the company said it will resume its vaccine rollout in Europe.<\/p>\n
J&J had decided to delay its rollout in the EU’s member states last week, after U.S. regulators called for a pause on the vaccine following concerns about the potential serious side effect.<\/p>\n
“The reported combination of blood clots and low blood platelets is very rare, and the overall benefits of COVID-19 Vaccine Janssen in preventing COVID-19 outweigh the risks of side effects,” the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Just eight cases of the blood clots out of about 7 million people who received the single-dose vaccine have been identified in the U.S., the agency noted.<\/p>\n
Next move?\u00a0<\/strong>The EMA’s decision could foreshadow what U.S. regulators will decide on Friday, when a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) advisory committee meets again. The panel of experts previously met last week, but they put off a decision on what to do about the vaccine until another meeting this Friday because of a lack of evidence. That delay\u00a0drew criticism<\/a>\u00a0from some experts, who said there was no good reason to prolong the pause.<\/p>\n Seen it before:\u00a0<\/strong>The EMA noted that similar instances of rare blood clots have been linked to a different COVID-19 vaccine, from AstraZeneca. Use of that vaccine has resumed after pauses in some countries in Europe, though some nations have added age restrictions.<\/p>\n The clotting cases with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have mostly been in women under 60 years of age.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Europe’s drug regulator said Tuesday that...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34226"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34227,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34226\/revisions\/34227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}