The US regulator calls for a “stop” of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine use

US health officials on Tuesday recommended that they stop using Johnson & Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine to investigate severe cases of blood clots in several people in the United States.

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L’Agence américaine des médicaments (FDA) “est en train d’enquêter sur six cas rapportés aux États-Unis de personnes ayant développé des cas rares et graves de caillots sanguins après avoir reçu le vaccin», at-elle indiqué dans statement.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the nation’s main federal public health agency, will meet on Wednesday to assess these various conditions. The U.S. Medicines Agency will then review their findings.

The Food and Drug Administration affirmed that “as long as this procedure is being implemented, we recommend a temporary suspension,” specifying action “for the sake of caution.”

But the US Medicines Agency confirmed last Friday that there is no causal relationship at this point between the formation of blood clots and the injection of the vaccine against the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 virus.

In the reported cases, scientists observed a cerebral venous thrombosis, meaning blockage by one or more cerebral venous sinuses, as well as low levels of platelets in the blood, confirms the foundation.

The six people affected by these serious thromboembolic events are women, between the ages of 18 and 48, whose symptoms appeared 6 to 13 days after the injection.

U.S. health officials have warned that treatments commonly used to treat blood clots, such as heparin, can be dangerous when it comes to the types of thrombosis discovered by the Food and Drug Administration that require alternative treatment.

The US Food and Drug Administration said that more than 6.8 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson anti-Covid vaccine have already been administered in the United States, and this kind of serious side effect appears at the present time to be “extremely rare”.

Several people in the United States who were to be given an injection of the Johnson & Johnson serum began receiving letters early Tuesday morning to cancel their vaccination appointment.

The announcement comes as the European Medicines Agency (EMA) said last week that it is also investigating the links between the J&J vaccine and blood clots.

The Johnson & Johnson single-dose vaccine was urgently licensed in the United States at the end of February, after two doses of Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna.

It has been shown to be 66% effective in preventing moderate to severe forms of Covid-19, according to clinical trials of nearly 40,000 people aged 18 years or over in several countries around the world.

As a “viral vector,” the “J&J” vaccine is used as support for another low-pathogen, transformed virus to add genetic instructions from the part of the virus responsible for Covid-19. Once inside the cells, a typical SARS-CoV-2 protein is produced, to educate the immune system for identification.