ORLANDO, Fla. — COVID-19 vaccination efforts continue across the U.S. and Florida as the pause on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, could be lifted by Friday.
Sunday marked the sixth days since the J&J vaccine was shut down in the U.S.
Some vaccine sites stopped offering first doses all together because of the shot’s timeout.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said he believes federal regulators will give the vaccine the go ahead in just a few days.
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The Food and Drug Administration was clear from the beginning, the J&J vaccine pause would last days, not weeks.
Officials with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Florida have indicated they do not want to wait that long to restart first doses at their site at the Valencia College West Campus.
Before the pause, this Valencia College site was doing 3,000 J&J shots every day.
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Officials at the site cut first doses off completely after the FDA and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced the halt on the J&J vaccine after six women developed severe blood clots.
The Valencia site will now pivot to Pfizer shots starting Tuesday. They don’t know how many they will have up for grabs just yet, but they said it will very likely be less than 3,000.
Because the Valencia location will now be offering a 2-dose vaccine, they may need to extend the sites stay a bit longer, to ensure everyone who got their first dose at the site is able to receive their second dose.
But after Fauci’s announcement, there’s a chance that we could see the J&J back and available.
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“I would think that we’re not going to go beyond Friday in the extension of this pause,” Fauci said. “I believe we’ll get back with it and it might be some restrictions, not sure what that will be, whether it will be age or sex or whether they’ll just come back with a warning of some sort. I don’t want to get ahead of them but I believe that we’ll be back with some sort of indication, a little different than we were before the pause.”
In the meantime, mobile one-day sites in different neighborhoods that were also using the J&J shot will now use the Pfizer vaccine.
See the full report in the video above.