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A State-wide Canceled Appointment after a Pause in Vaccinations



CHICAGO — The student union had been converted into a vaccination center. The doses had arrived on campus. The first appointments were minutes away. Then, at 7:23 a.m. on Tuesday, news of the pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccinations reached Youngstown State University.

“We were ready to go,” said Shannon Tirone, an associate vice president at the university, in eastern Ohio, who instead started calling students to tell them they would not be able to get the vaccine after all.

Similar scenes played out across the country as the abrupt halt in the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine because of concerns about potential blood clots upended plans to vaccinate some of the country’s hardest-to-reach populations.

In California, mobile vaccine clinics in rural areas were canceled. In Chicago, vaccination events for restaurant employees and aviation workers were postponed indefinitely. And at colleges in Ohio, New York and Tennessee, where the one-dose vaccine offered a chance to quickly inoculate students before they left campus for the summer, appointments were called off en masse.

“It really fit into this kind of tight deadline we were doing,” Ms. Tirone said of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. She said she hoped to offer another on-campus clinic in Youngstown with one of the two-dose alternatives, but she worried that students would not be eligible for a second dose until finals week or later.

At the White House, Biden administration officials played down the effect of the Johnson & Johnson pause and pledged to help states with the logistics involved in rescheduling patients to receive shots from Pfizer and Moderna, the two other coronavirus vaccine manufacturers authorized by the Food and Drug Administration.

Federal health officials said the Johnson & Johnson vaccine could be returned to use in days after a review by the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The most important thing is that the supply exists to continue to vaccinate three million Americans a day, and there’s enough supply to actually accelerate that,” Jeffrey D. Zients, the Covid response coordinator at the White House, told reporters on Tuesday.

In much of the country, public health officials said they were able to offer other vaccines to people who had been scheduled to receive a Johnson & Johnson shot.

The Albany County Health Department in New York said it would provide Pfizer doses for a Johnson & Johnson clinic on Tuesday at a local university. The chief public health officer in Detroit said people who had appointments for a Johnson & Johnson vaccine at a city-run site would be allowed to keep their times and receive a Pfizer or Moderna shot. And officials in New Hampshire, who had planned to use the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on Tuesday at clinics and for homebound patients, said they were working to find Pfizer or Moderna doses to use instead.

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“This news will not slow down New Hampshire,” Gov. Chris Sununu said in a statement. “While the federal government has directed a brief pause in the J&J vaccine, the state is already working with our partners to ensure that they have an alternative supply of Pfizer or Moderna to help continue their efforts today.”

But in some places, there was no immediate alternative. In Aurora, Ill., a mass vaccination clinic planned for Tuesday was called off, leaving 1,000 patients without appointments. In Riverside County, Calif., mobile clinics that had planned to vaccinate about 400 people in less populous areas on Tuesday were canceled. And in rural Jefferson County, in southeast Iowa, a Johnson & Johnson clinic targeting manufacturing workers was scrapped at the last minute.

“It was so heartbreaking to me,” said Christine Estle, the county’s public health nurse administrator, who said she and her colleagues had encouraged the roughly 140 people scheduled to attend to make appointments at local pharmacies or hospitals.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine had long been seen as a key to the country’s vaccination effort because it requires only one shot, unlike the two-dose Moderna and Pfizer regimens, and because it can be stored more easily. In cities around the country, public health experts had begun using the vaccine in places where hesitancy about one shot — much less two — is high.

“I just want to do everything we can to have those people who signed up for appointments still come for them with Pfizer or Moderna,” said Dr. Allison Arwady, the Chicago public health commissioner, who said she worried that the pause would undermine vaccine confidence and that she had already heard of skeptical patients asking whether the other shots were safe.

Dr. Arwady said her department had been using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to reach people who might otherwise be unlikely to seek one out by offering it at workplaces, churches and even along bus lines.

“A lot of our more creative planning has been with J&J,” she said. “People who have a lot of barriers to get vaccinated, a single-dose vaccine can be very good.”

In Colorado, state officials had expressed optimism that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine would help reach residents who lived far outside cities like Denver or Boulder. Gov. Jared Polis recently kicked off a program using blue and red buses to carry the one-dose vaccine to rural communities around the state.

That effort was suspended as the mobile vaccination clinics were shut down for at least Tuesday and Wednesday. Officials did not say when the buses might begin rolling again, or whether they would eventually switch to distributing the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.

The situation was similarly uncertain in Ithaca, N.Y., where officials at Ithaca College canceled their College Student Vaccination Day.

“Although unfortunate that we will be unable to provide our students with Thursday’s planned vaccine opportunity, Ithaca College will continue to work with its local partners to identify future clinic opportunities for the two-dose Pfizer and Moderna vaccine series,” the college said in an email.

“Thank you for your understanding,” they added.

Mitch Smith reported from Chicago, and Michael D. Shear from Washington. Danielle Ivory contributed reporting from New York.