Philly’s biggest COVID-19 vaccination clinic will get more doses in response to the J&J pause

In a reversal prompted by the pause on one COVID-19 vaccine brand over safety concerns, federal authorities said Wednesday they will continue providing another type of vaccine to the Convention Center mass clinic that is distributing more doses than any other in Philadelphia.

Losing, at least temporarily, thousands of Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses was a new complication as the nation races to vaccinate its population amid rising case counts and the risk of variants developing that could prove vaccine-resistant.

“It is a race to get vaccinated, a race with these variants, and we don’t want these variants to win,” Val Arkoosh, Montgomery County’s Board of Commissioners chair and a physician, said Wednesday, noting that the county’s rising case counts included a likely “very high percentage” of variant cases.

The Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommended Tuesday a pause on administering single doses of the J&J vaccines due to reports of a rare clotting disorder reported in six women, one of whom died. Nearly seven million Americans have had the vaccine.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said in a statement Wednesday that it will supply the Center City clinic at the Convention Center with 4,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine each day, about two-thirds of what it has provided there since the clinic opened six weeks ago, through May 26. The city will provide an additional 2,000 doses a day out of its own vaccine stockpile, which will allow the clinic to continue administering shots at its current rate.

The doses currently administered each week at the Convention Center come directly from FEMA and are not part of the 80,000-dose allocation of Pfizer and Moderna vaccines the city receives weekly. Philadelphia’s vaccine program is run separately from the rest of Pennsylvania’s.

A supply of 84,000 doses from FEMA is expected to arrive Monday, with another shipment of that size scheduled for early May.

» READ MORE: Pa. Congress members seek White House help to keep Philly’s largest vaccine provider open

Just last week FEMA said it would not provide doses beyond April 26, when the mass clinic was originally scheduled to close. FEMA had planned to offer J&J doses until then, but Tuesday’s recommendation from the FDA and the CDC to pause use of that vaccine upended those plans. Philadelphia Department of Public Health officials said the city would tap its vaccine stockpile to keep the clinic running but couldn’t sustain it for long without more FEMA doses.

FEMA’s renewed commitment to the Convention Center was “an exciting development,” said James Garrow, a spokesperson for the city health department. FEMA’s contribution frees the city to continue supplying vaccine to smaller providers throughout Philadelphia, which have proven essential to addressing under-vaccination in some of the city’s lower-income communities of color.

Keeping the Convention Center clinic “open and operating at full capacity while running community clinics and pharmacies throughout the city while running targeted outreach to vulnerable communities and facilities is the best way forward,” Garrow said.

Even before Tuesday’s pause in J&J vaccine administration, the nation was facing a drop in that product due to a manufacturing error in Baltimore that left 15 million J&J doses unusable. Philadelphia’s most current allocation of 2,800 J&J doses was more than 10,000 doses smaller than the week before.

Three local members of Congress and a U.S. senator wrote the White House last week asking to keep FEMA doses flowing into Philadelphia. There have also been conversations between congressional staff and White House personnel, said Rep. Dwight Evans, who signed the letter.

The Democrat credited FEMA and the Biden administration for the Convention Center’s record of administering more than 220,000 shots since it opened. Keeping the FEMA site operating was a priority, Evans said, because of the access, equity, and convenience the site offered the city.

“We’re advocating for the people of Pennsylvania,” he said. “We’re all in this together.”

Officials throughout the region have said they had leaned less heavily on the J&J vaccine than on Pfizer or Moderna doses.

Only about 4% of the more than 5.6 million vaccines administered in New Jersey have been J&J doses, Gov. Phil Murphy said Wednesday.

The state has asked vaccine sites to reschedule any appointments that had planned to use J&J doses, pending further updates from federal agencies, Murphy said, but added the pause will not affect the state’s goal of immunizing 70% of adults by this summer.

”We will keep pushing forward with the tools available to us,” he said.

Arkoosh said, though, the pause would slow Montgomery County’s efforts to reach homeless and homebound people, and has delayed the opening of a new county clinic by a week.

There have been no serious complications associated with the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which make up the bulk of the city’s and state’s vaccine supplies.

It remains unclear if the J&J vaccine, which has been administered to 6.8 million people, has a causal relationship with the rare type of blood clots that developed in six women. A federal review is underway.

» READ MORE: Scrambled plans, delays and new fears accompany J&J COVID-19 vaccination pause across Philly region

The J&J vaccine has the advantage of requiring only one dose to reach its full potency; the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines each require two shots, administered several weeks apart. The Convention Center mass clinic will offer first doses only from April 19 to May 5, and then will shift to providing only second doses for another three weeks.