Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams supports the pause of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine distribution.
The nation’s doctor under former President Donald Trump said that temporarily suspending the administration of the vaccines was the “right choice” in a Tuesday Washington Post op-ed.
“Medical professionals’ highest obligation is to avoid knowingly inflicting harm on patients. This pause is as much about maintaining public trust as it is about individual harm vs. potential benefit,” he wrote. “Emerging data on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was concerning enough to necessitate pausing and closer study.”
In contrast to the views of many, including Trump, that the pause will shatter public confidence in the vaccine, Adams argued that the pause “should actually instill confidence among Americans that the safety monitoring process is working as it should.”
TRUMP BLASTS FEDERAL REGULATORS FOR URGING PAUSE IN USE OF JOHNSON AND JOHNSON VACCINES
“There is no drug for which all of the possible safety issues are known before authorization or approval. If a complication has an incidence of 1 in 1 million people, the complication may not become statistically detectable until several million people have received the therapy. Even then, it would become visible only if robust reporting and review systems are in place. That is exactly why the FDA reviews drug data for many years after initial approval,” he said. “The COVID-19 vaccine trials and approval process are working as they should, and now we have evidence that the monitoring process is functioning appropriately.”
The stance puts Adams at odds with his former boss, who blasted regulators for deciding to slow the vaccine’s distribution.
“The Biden Administration did a terrible disservice to people throughout the world by allowing the FDA and CDC to call a ‘pause’ in the use of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine,” the former president wrote in a tweemail on Tuesday. “The results of this vaccine have been extraordinary but now it’s [sic] reputation will be permanently challenged.”
Trump questioned the motives behind the pause, suggesting that regulators were suspending the administration of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because of “possibly political reasons, or maybe because their friends at Pfizer have suggested it.”
The Food and Drug Administration, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, called for the pause on Tuesday morning, following the news that six recipients of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in the United States developed a rare disorder involving blood clots within about two weeks of vaccination.
Distribution of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, the third vaccine to earn a temporary use authorization by the FDA, following Pfizer and Moderna, hit a few snags prior to the blood clots. A batch of 15 million Johnson & Johnson vaccines spoiled in Baltimore earlier this month, slowing overseas military inoculations. The company was then given control of the Emergent BioSolutions plant on April 4, just days before the reports of rare blood clots began to emerge.
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More than 192 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered, and 122 million people have received at least one dose, representing 36.8% of the U.S. population, according to the CDC. About 31 million cases of COVID-19 have been diagnosed throughout the U.S., and nearly 560,000 deaths have been attributed to the disease, the agency said.
