AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Federal health officials have informed state officials that a Texas woman has been hospitalized with possible blood clots associated with Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine recipients, a state spokesman said Thursday.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention informed the Texas Department of State Health Services of the situation Wednesday afternoon through the federal Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, said DSHS spokesman Chris Van Deusen.
The federal agencies said an adult woman had been hospitalized in Texas with “symptoms that appear to be consistent with those few other reported cases” of a rare blood clotting disorder developed after receiving the J&J vaccine. No other information was being released, he said, citing patient privacy and confidentiality.
Federal and state agencies have paused the J&J vaccine rollout due to concerns about blood clots. Federal officials already were examining six reports of the unusual clots, including a death, out of more than 6.8 million Americans given the one-dose vaccination so far.
The most widely used COVID-19 vaccines in the U.S. - two-shot vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna - are made with completely different technology, and the FDA has said there is no sign of a similar clot concern with those vaccines.
New COVID-19 cases in Texas returned to below-average levels as 2,990 cases were reported Thursday, compared to the seven-day rolling average of 3,350 calculated by Johns Hopkins University researchers. New deaths remained above average, however, with 69 new COVID-19 deaths. The rolling Johns Hopkins seven-day average for Texas was almost 56.
The CDC said that the percentage of the Texas population receiving at least one dose of COVID-19 vaccine had topped 36%, while the percentage of those fully vaccinated was almost 24%.
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