ATLANTA — Johnson & Johnson vaccines are still paused in Georgia and across the country, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention investigate rare cases of people suffering blood clots.
An advisory panel for the CDC is expected to meet again about it in exactly a week. Growing concerns lead towards vaccine hesitancy and conspiracy theories about the virus.
Mark Tompkins, Professor of Infectious Diseases at the University of Georgia, said it’s best to pay attention to the factual data.
“While vaccines are not risk free, they are incredibly safe. The numbers don’t lie. The likelihood of having a seriously adverse reaction from any vaccine is incredibly low,” he said.
According to the CDC, nearly 7 million Johnson and Johnson vaccines have been administered nationwide. But they’ve now been halted after reports of six women, between the ages of 18 and 48, who developed blood clots.
“When they saw the signal, and I’m going to refer to it as a signal, because we see blood clots in a small number of people who received the vaccines, it suggest maybe there’s something going on there. We don’t know for certain so we call it a signal,” Tompkins said.
Dr. Merhdod Ehteshami, E.R. Physician, said some people were already concerned with how quickly the vaccines were developed and whether they’re safe. He knows the headlines this week could be heightening their fears.
“First of all, I completely understand how complex this issue is. What we’ve asked people to do for the past year is to take a very complicated issue and such as a disease, that has resulted in economic hardships, and for them to make sense of it, that’s a hard thing to do,” Ehteshami said.
However, he said vaccination is still the best option on the table.
“Vaccination is of the utmost importance for us to get through this pandemic,” he said.
Emergency Physician Michelle Wan, from Viral Solutions, said that the key to decreasing hesitation is transparency and educating people about the vaccines – including Moderna and Pfizer, which are still available in Georgia right now.
“We’re right at the finish line, we’re very close to it and all we need to do is to hang on a little bit longer,” Wan said.