GREENSBORO, N.C. — Dr. David Agus, CBS News Contributor Dr. David Agus answers some of your top questions after the FDA recommended pausing the use of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine Tuesday after extremely rare cases of major side effects.
If someone has already received this vaccine, should they be concerned?
Certainly, I think everyone is upset here. There is a similar vaccine AstraZeneca that is also an adenovirus vaccine, where blood clots were seen also in really small numbers. And when you're seeing it with two different vaccines that have some similarity we get really worried. So, tomorrow morning there will be an advisory meeting where they'll review these six cases and see whether they think they are related to the vaccine or not and what to do. The hope is we could develop a plan to prevent these from happening.
All six cases in the United States were women. Does this blood clotting only impact women?
The AstraZeneca one it's majority women, and it seems to be associated because women are more susceptible to this type of blood clotting. but it's not exclusively so there are some men in Europe that have been seen. But in the United States to date, it's only women and women who are under the age of 50, so premenopausal women.
How long after you get the vaccine could these reactions occur?
All of the cases developed six to 13 days after the vaccine. And they noted pain in the abdomen or headache and that caused them to go to the hospital. You have to monitor yourself, and if you have any symptoms where you have pain and it's unexplainable, go to an emergency room right away and doctors around the country are now aware of this and they know how to treat it, so the key is to listen to your body. And if you start to feel pain somewhere or swelling somewhere, you need to go to the doctor and be evaluated. It's easy to treat once we've identified it but yeah, it's horrible. I wish it hadn't happened. it's going to put a wrench in all the vaccines. And we need to figure out a national plan to move forward.
If you had the J & J vaccine more than two weeks ago, are you in the clear?
That's a great point, yeah, from what we know from this and the AstraZeneca vaccine, if you're past two weeks - you're in the clear. And it's not probably going to happen then. If you're worried about anything, your doctor can check a blood test and look if your platelet counts are low or look for a particular type of antibody that's associated with this. But I would only do so if you had symptoms or were worried.