Doctor on J&J vaccine: 'We’re talking about one in a million for these clots'

The CDC and FDA have recommended that the U.S. pause the use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine. New Jersey Emergency Medicine Physician Dr. Anand Swaminathan joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss.

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: Let's bring in Dr. Anand Swaminathan, an emergency medicine physician in New York. Doctor, Anjalee providing some important context there. We're talking about nearly seven million people who've gotten the J&J vaccine. Just six people had issues. How should those out there who are maybe considering getting this vaccine be looking at the news today?

ANAND SWAMINATHAN: Honestly, that context is what's really important. And if I was signed up and this was the option I had in front of me, I would get the J&J vaccine today. And the reason is because we're talking about one in a million for these clots. And again, let's put it in context. One in five hospitalized patients with COVID form a blood clot. They're not the same clots that we're talking about that we're seeing in association with the vaccine, but clots are very common with COVID.

And we look overall, one in 10 people in the US are getting COVID. One in 1,000 or about 1 and 1/2 in 1,000 are dying from COVID. And we're talking about one in a million that are getting these clots. It's really a tiny number. These vaccines, the J&J, the mRNA vaccines, they are safe, they are effective. And if you are in line to get one, I would get one.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah, doctor, we talk so much about kind of the impact now moving forward. We already saw that kind of play out with AstraZeneca, when a bunch of countries made their move to suspend vaccinations, citing similar blood clotting issues.

But when you think about what happens now, I guess, America is a bit in a bit of a state of luxury here, given the fact that we have Moderna and Pfizer rolling out still. But what do you think about the long run implications when it comes to fears out there that Americans might not want to get this now moving forward, particularly when it comes to those rural areas that were already celebrating the fact that this was just one dose?

ANAND SWAMINATHAN: And this is really one of the big problems, Zack, because, yes, those other vaccines are here. We have lots of them. We have a glut of vaccines, in many ways. But there are specific communities that don't have a lot of vaccines. And the J&J really plays a powerful role there. I just recently was talking about the fact that every emergency department in the country should have J&J available to vaccinate patients because that's a setting where we know patients are coming. They don't necessarily have the ability to get or have access to getting a shot. They don't have the ability to have internet to get the appointments made. And so the J&J was really powerful in those groups.

So we really do need this vaccine. It's going to be extremely beneficial for us to get it back. A pause is reasonable just to get a little bit more information, find out the circumstances of these cases, talk to clinicians. But the FDA, the CDC, we should have done a better job in controlling or, really, in guiding this story. We see lots of headlines saying blood clots secondary to the vaccine. And we don't really have the numbers there. And the numbers are important. And that context is so important. One in a million is an extremely small rate and the savings or the benefit of these vaccines far outweighs those risks.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Doctor, on that note, specifically looking at the trial data, they did have some instance of the blood clots, but it wasn't largely in women. It wasn't that widespread, to your point of it's a very small subset. Should they have taken a proactive step in knowing that there was already this and added that to the fact sheet ahead of time?

ANAND SWAMINATHAN: I don't know that we should have added it to the fact sheet based on the data that we had. What is going to be interesting to see is if there is some relationship, as you mentioned, with oral contraceptives, in which case we should be advising people, if you're getting a J&J, maybe you have to go off of those OCPs for a month. Maybe that's the thing that's going to be beneficial. And so we can see how getting this data, analyzing it, can benefit both clinicians and patients moving forward in delivering these vaccines in the safest way, getting this extra information. But again, it's a very small number of cases.

AKIKO FUJITA: And we should point out, doctor, that New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio is saying that New York City is going to be pausing all J&J vaccines. The city plans to reschedule 4,000 appointments in the coming days. This comes at a time when we have really started to sort of hit the stride, if you will, in getting so many Americans vaccinated, hitting a record over the weekend. What does today's news do to that in terms of the rate of vaccines that are likely to happen over the next several weeks?

ANAND SWAMINATHAN: Well, this is clearly an obstacle. And we've hit a number of obstacles now with J&J. First was the issue with manufacturing. And now we're hitting this second issue. The fact that J&J vaccine is a small percentage of our overall vaccine push is beneficial. So I think that the other vaccines will be able to take up that spot. We'll be able to get back on track. But it's going to be a little bit of a blip. These kind of obstacles were inevitable. When we're trying to vaccinate this many people in a short period of time, obstacles were going to pop up.

It's going to be a matter of how we respond to those obstacles over the next couple of weeks. Can we ramp up production more of the mRNA vaccines? Can we really replace those appointments? Even better, can we just tell people, just come in anyway and we will get you one of the mRNA vaccines on the appointment that you already have, which I know in New York City, they've been trying to do. So these are the kind of things that we need to see how we adapt, how we really flex to these situations that are popping up now.

ZACK GUZMAN: And doctor, lastly, I mean, we were talking about some critics looking at the US and saying that they were stockpiling these vaccines. There are multiple requests to get out AstraZeneca-- it hasn't been approved here-- and also the Johnson & Johnson vaccines as well to some other countries, trying to improve their own standing right now in this pandemic, because we see cases globally start to tick back up. What do you make of that and how this actually implicates kind of the global response here, since this is all interconnected on a certain level, and how it might not set us back but it could set back the global response?

ANAND SWAMINATHAN: It might set us back. It might set back that global response, and that global response is so important. Because unless we're vaccinating everybody in the world, we're never going to control this pandemic. Now those AstraZeneca vaccines that we're sitting on, it is highly unlikely that we ever use those in the United States based on the rollout of our mRNA vaccines. We really should be finding ways to get those out. And I know that the Biden administration and the COVID task force is working on ways to get those vaccines to other places and try to figure out how to do that the best way.

But we really do have to continue to take that global perspective of how does this affect our distribution of vaccines elsewhere, and especially with that J&J, where it was supposedly, at least the best information we have, the one shot, and as that ramps up, getting that out to other places. So we do need to look at this information, find out how relevant it is, and then continue to push to get those vaccines abroad.

AKIKO FUJITA: Dr. Anand Swaminathan, emergency medicine physician, our thanks to you for providing some context, and our thanks to Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani as well.