What's causing the blood clots? FDA's Peter Marks says this is just a theory, but that it could be an immune response that occurs very rarely after vaccination, causing activation of blood platelets.
Presser available live here:
Woodcock says FDA/CDC have done an extensive review of the reported events and looked at the background rate of these clots.
Marks says these types of clots have a background rate of 2-14 per million people. BUT says there's a pattern of events similar to Europe events.
👀The FDA and CDC are calling for a pause in the use of J&J’s vaccine after a series of blood clots in six women.
Statement:
So far, about 6.86 million doses of J&J’s vaccine have been used in the U.S., so that’s a known rate of less than 1 in 1,000,000.
Many of the J&J doses have also been targeted, by the feds, at harder to reach populations. If there are vaccine-hesitant among those, this news may not help.
We know there's been a lot of interest -- especially recently! -- in "how many shots are out there." Now you can see that, and see what's coming:
☝️This dataset is from the weekly CDC allocations, dated to the time of announcement (our best judgment on when doses are made "available" or "delivered" to the federal gov.). We've also recreated a history of non-CDC-allocated doses, which get announced by the WH.
This is a one-day record -- the second in a row. (The 4.5M day a big ago is an artifact of CDC's data reporting, which we'll correct if we can but.... it's a bit complicated.)
We're seeing surges in vaccines being shipped, lots more places to administer them, and an expansion of eligibility. No surprise the numbers are going up, here.
🧵2/ If past trends hold, we could be in for some very big numbers this weekend. (Saturdays and Sundays have been among our biggest days, typically.)
3/ There may also be some catch-up action going on here, so treat this number with a grain of salt. We know there were some states (texas) with some reporting delays earlier this week.
This is one frustration of having to rely entirely on CDC data after their methodology switch.
Our methodology blog post also has (from CDC) what the number today *would* have been with a normal pull time. You can find it here (it's still a lot):
⚠️This is a huge number that's 50% bigger than we've ever seen. it's possible there's some sort of data/methodological reason for this. We are investigating and will post a blog/more tweets if we find out something more.
In the meantime, <sportscenter voice> THAT'S A BIG ONE
There are some states here that are all having record days: Take a look at Cali, NY, Mississippi, North Carolina:
⚠️Data note: We made a chance to our NYC methodology that brings it in line with the rest of the U.S. The % of people vaccinated now reflects residents, not place of vaccination. The resulted in a change to our NYC %s.
⭐️Our U.S. 7-day average is now 2.01M doses/day, the first time above 2M. This appears to be driven by a combo of winter-storm make-up doses + increasing supply.
📊1.91M doses today; 7-day 2.01M
🇺🇸US: 80.5M doses total
If there's a significant pull-back after the storm make-up bump, this could slip back down. But between J&J doses going into arms this week + rising shipments of about 15M doses/week, that seems unlikely/short-lived.
We have our usual update coming later tonight, and I'll thread it here. But in the meantime we have a very important methodology update about how we get data + count doses.
Short version: CDC made major changes in how they attribute doses to states, in a way that makes their data non-comparable with state-produced data. Unless something changed, we will be using CDC data for the U.S. going forward. Read the details here:
Upside: It places Defense Dept. vaccinations in the place where people reside. That's important -- the 1918 flu is thought to have started in a military base in Kansas. These federal categories aren't abstract.
1/ As of this afternoon, CDC is assigning doses given to people in federal entities TO the states where they reside. This significantly affects the CDC's state totals in a way that makes them harder to compare to state dashboards
2/ This amounts to about 3 million doses. This makes it much harder for us to compare what states report to what CDC reports, which is a big part of our model. (Federal entity numbers are not typically included in state-reported vaccine tallies.)
You can see how various groups are getting vaccinated vs their populations. Black and Hispanic populations are being vaccinated below their population shares, while some groups are getting vaccinated above.
Because many states don't report the data, on don't have great data completeness, we've integrated state-by-state data quality rankings -- you can explore them here: bloomberg.com/graphics/covid…
New cases in the U.S. continue to fall after the holiday surge. This chart plots total vaccinations vs confirmed cases. More vaccine = more impact on driving down new cases. The leveling off there is (probably mostly) from post-holiday decline.
Here's our table of vaccine deals -- the U.S. now has a TON of vaccine inbound. It's also received more vaccine faster than many other countries with deals for cleared vaccines -- Canada got briefly cut off, more or less, amid a supply interruption
⚠️We did NOT get updates in time today from Maryland + New Jersey, which may have caused a slightly lower total than usual. CDC did report totals, which may compensate.
U.S. leaders:
➕12 states over 1M doses admin
➕4 states over 2M
As expected, the number of people completing vaccination is starting to pick up quickly. It should trail the first-dose rate by about 3.5 weeks (assuming supply remains steady)
In the U.S., states have started taking unused doses from nursing homes and pulling them back into their state distribution systems -- this should tighten up some of the slack in the system. Per @angelicalavito
In our global rate chart, China makes infrequent reports. Those reports are very big. So it ends up looking...weird. This will likely clean up over time, but the data are the data.
2 added to My Authors
