Fauci reminds of small risk for J&J vaccine

The nation's leading infectious-diseases expert says Americans who’ve recently received a Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine shouldn’t be anxious about the “pause” in shots because of reports of blood clots. (April 13)

Video Transcript

ANTHONY FAUCI: This is a really rare event. If you look at what we know so far, there have been six out of the 6.85 million doses, which is less than 1 in a million. So remember, this is something that we always, really, out of an abundance of caution, as Jeff said, to give us a time to take a good look at it and see if we can get further information.

The questions that come up already rather frequently, does this have anything to do with the efficacy of the vaccine? So we know that there have been 6.85 million doses of J&J distributed in the United States thus far. So someone who maybe had it a month or two ago would say, what does this mean for me? It really doesn't mean anything. You're OK because if you look at the time frame when this occurs, it's pretty tight, from a few days, 6 to 13 days from the time of the vaccination.

You want to make sure that safety is the important issue here. We are totally aware that this is a very rare event. We want to get this worked out as quickly as we possibly can, and that's why you see the word pause. In other words, you want to hold off for a bit and very well may go back to that, maybe with some conditions or maybe not. But we want to leave that up to the FDA and the CDC to investigate this carefully. So I don't think it was pulling the trigger too quickly.

JEFF ZIENTS: So we have more than enough supply of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to continue the current pace of about 3 million shots per day, and that puts us well on pace to meet the president's goal of 200 million shots by his 100th day in office and continue to reach every adult who wants to get vaccinated.