Jefferson County Public Health struggling to fill spots for Friday vaccine clinic

FAIRFIELD — Several spots are still available for a COVID-19 vaccine clinic that Jefferson County Public Health is hosting Friday.

Jefferson County Public Health Administrator Chris Estle said the clinic will administer the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which requires only one shot instead of two like the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. As of Tuesday, only 30 people had signed up for the clinic, though public health has enough vaccines to serve 110 people. Public Health is encouraging residents to sign up for a morning time between 8-11:30 a.m. The public health department can be reached at (641) 472-5929.

This will be the first Johnson & Johnson vaccine clinic public health has hosted since the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended a pause on the rollout of the company’s vaccine on April 13, citing rare but severe blood clots that occurred in six women between the ages of 18 and 48 out of 6.8 million people who had received the vaccine. The FDA and CDC issued a new recommendation 10 days later lifting the pause on the vaccine.

Estle said she had scheduled a Johnson & Johnson vaccine clinic for April 14, and when she and her staff heard the news about the recommended pause the day before, had to call the 135 people who had signed up for the clinic to tell them it was canceled.

Estle said there seems to be a big increase in vaccine hesitancy recently, which she said is unfortunate.

“When we have a tool in our toolbox and it’s not being used, it’s kind of sad,” she said.

Estle said she understands the FDA and CDC’s decision to pause the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, though in retrospect she wonders if it could have been more narrowly targeted to just women between the ages of 18-50.

“We don’t know the underlying health conditions of the people who got blood clots,” she said. “It was a very small percentage who had problems with the vaccine, but those are the ones we’ll hear about and not the millions who got along fine.”

The percentage of people in Jefferson County who are fully vaccinated is 29.2 percent. Of those, 4,843 had completed a two-dose regimen, while 514 had received the one-dose Johnson & Johnson shot.