J&J vaccine can be given to adults 30+ but mRNA vaccines still preferred: NACI
Posted May 3, 2021 2:17 pm.
Last Updated May 3, 2021 8:23 pm.
The National Advisory Committee on Immunization (NACI) recommended on Monday that provinces give the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to adults 30 years of age and older.
The NACI said the single-dose vaccine should be limited to people in that age group who don’t want to wait for the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccines.
The advice is almost identical to that issued for the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine last month and comes as both are suspected of causing a new and very rare blood clotting syndrome.
In Canada there have been seven known cases of vaccine-induced thrombotic thrombocytopenia, or VITT, one of them fatal.
As of April 24, 1.7 million people in Canada have been given at least one dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine.
No J&J doses have been injected in Canada thus far, but in the U.S. they have documented 17 cases of the blood-clotting disorder in about eight million doses given.
Health Canada had paused its distribution of 300,000 J&J doses after discovering they were partly made at an American facility cited for safety and quality-control violations.
NACI also recommended that provinces use the J&J vaccine on populations that may have trouble booking a second dose if they were given a different vaccine.
