Beshear temporarily halts use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine in Kentucky

Asking for calm, Gov. Andy Beshear said Kentucky will immediately halt its rollout of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine while federal health officials assess its risk, but he doesn’t expect the pause to last long.

“It looks like the risk here is very, very small [compared to] the very significant risk of being harmed by COVID-19,” he said Tuesday. “You have less than a one in one million chance of developing these clots if you’ve got the J&J vaccine. So, if you’ve gotten the vaccine, there’s likely no reason to worry.”

Beshear’s decision comes after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control earlier on Tuesday issued a joint statement asking states to immediately pause use of the single-dose vaccine, after six women developed serious blood clotting within roughly two weeks of getting their dose. One of them died.

Close to seven million people nationwide have gotten this vaccine, and CDC officials warned, “right now, these adverse events appear to be extremely rare.”

In trying to contextualize the information further, Kentucky Public Health Commissioner Steven Stack said, “The relative risk of harm from COVID-19 enormously outweighs the risk of any potential harm from a vaccine.”

Across Kentucky, close to 1.6 million people have received at least their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, primarily from Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna. While Beshear couldn’t immediately say how many of shots given in Kentucky were Johnson & Johnson, they are a fraction of the state’s supply, comprising roughly 210,000 of the total dose allocation, to date.

As such, pulling Johnson & Johnson for the time being “is not crippling news for our vaccination efforts,” Beshear said.

Kentucky, like many states, has used the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to immunize more vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations, since no follow-up appointment is required. State officials have relied on the single-dose vaccine to immunize people housed in Kentucky’s jails and prisons, rural Kentuckians who lack reliable transportation, as well as people experiencing homelessness.

Some of these efforts may stop for the time being, including the mass immunization currently underway inside Kentucky’s jails and prisons, as well as pop-up clinics targeted at populations experiencing homelessness.

For those independent pharmacies that had been administering the single-dose vaccine, “we’re working with them to make sure, if this pause goes more than a couple days,” that their supply is replenished somehow, Beshear said.

The CDC’s advisory committee will convene on Wednesday to determine whether more than six people developed clotting as a result of the vaccine, and to inform medical providers on how to treat these particular clots, should more arise in patients.

On Tuesday before his press conference, Beshear joined other state leaders on a call with federal health officials, who said the nationwide pause is “likely to be days, possibly a week,” Beshear said. Of the panel meeting Wednesday, “They believe they will find the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to be safe to administer in the future.”

If the CDC’s assessment yields no more clotting cases, Beshear said he’s worried about how this step will affect those Kentuckians who were already hesitant about getting vaccinated.

“I am concerned that, if there are not more cases out there, that the hesitancy coming out of the pause could potentially outweigh the need for it,” he said.