Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” White House chief medical adviser Anthony Fauci sounded off on the “immediate pause” in the rollout of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine. This comes as six Americans have reportedly developed blood clots after receiving the shot.
As some may have vaccine hesitancy as a result of the reported issues, Fauci said the halt could be “quite temporary” and stressed the FDA and CDC just want to gather more information on the vaccines. He added the effort to exercise caution is “a confirmation of how seriously we take safety.”
“[T]he FDA and the CDC made a decision based on an accumulating number of cases,” Fauci advised. “Small though they may be, they wanted to make sure they had all the information, and the prudent thing was to say let’s just stop. Very well may be quite temporary, but they just want to take a look and see if they can gather more information or even see if there are more cases that have gone unnoticed.”
“There’s another side to that story because much of the hesitancy that we encounter are people who wonder about the safety of a particular vaccine,” he added. “I mean, I know I’m out there talking to people all the time. This, in fact, is a confirmation of how seriously we take safety. So rather than turning people off about it, if you pause it for a little while and said, you know, we’re very concerned to make sure that what we put in your arm is safe, we wanted to take a few days, take a look at this, get more details about it and then very likely I don’t want to get ahead of the FDA but very likely they’ll say we looked at it and now we’ll go back, maybe make some modifications. So to me, it’s an argument for why you should get vaccinated because the system is working. The system that is trying to protect the American people is working, which is what triggered the FDA and the CDC to do that.”
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