Bucks Postpones Remaining J & J Vaccine
Bucks County News
Bucks Postpones Remaining J & J Vaccine Appointments Through Saturday
April 14, 2021
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Bucks County announced tonight it will postpone all remaining appointments this week at its Warwick Square mass vaccination site as Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine remains on hold.
The decision was made after federal officials met and discussed, but failed to resolve, whether J&J vaccinations should be allowed to resume soon. The Pennsylvania Department of Health on Tuesday ordered J&J use paused statewide until concerns over isolated blood clotting in six out-of-state women who received the one-dose vaccine could be investigated.
The continued pause forced county officials to postpone an additional 4,700 appointments scheduled for Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Warwick Square site. That was in addition to almost 1,800 appointments Tuesday and today that were postponed.
The county is working to re-schedule this week’s appointments on a two-week delay, offering the same time and day of the week as before.
Of Bucks County’s five mass vaccination sites, Warwick Square was the only one administering the J&J vaccine. The others have been using the two-dose Pfizer vaccine.
Those four sites, at the Neshaminy Mall and Bucks County’s three community college campuses, continue to operate smoothly on an appointment-only basis. On Tuesday they set a single-day record, administering 3,401 first and second doses of Pfizer, and are scheduled to give roughly 14,000 shots this week.
The J&J pause has been described as an “abundance of caution” move to allow the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration time to investigate the clotting incidents. Each of the six patients affected were women between the ages of 18 and 48, and are the only such reports resulting from more than 6.8 million J&J doses administered nationwide.
The CDC and FDA have recommended that J&J recipients contact their healthcare providers if they develop severe headaches, abdominal or leg pain, or shortness of breath within three weeks of receiving the vaccine. In a joint statement Tuesday, the agencies said such reactions “appear to be extremely rare.”
Through Tuesday, a total of 322,412 vaccinations had been administered in Bucks County, enough to fully vaccinate 123,108 people and partially vaccinate 89,157 more.
The state reported 278 new COVID infections in Bucks on Tuesday; the seven-day average of new cases is 285 per day. Six deaths were reported, bringing the pandemic death toll to 1,201.
A total of 97 COVID patients are in Bucks County hospitals, 24 of them in intensive care, including 12 on ventilators.
Media contact: Larry R. King, 215-348-6413, lrking@buckscounty.org