EXPLAINER: What's known about COVID vaccines and rare clots

EXPLAINER: What's known about COVID vaccines and rare clots

SeattlePI.com

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A rare, rogue immune response is the main suspect as authorities investigate highly unusual blood clots following use of two similar COVID-19 vaccines from Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca.

The U.S. recommended that states pause giving the J&J vaccine on Tuesday while authorities examine six reports of the unusual clots, including a death, out of more than 6.8 million Americans given the one-dose vaccination so far.

But the small number of cases sparked concern because just last week, European authorities said similar clots were possibly linked to the AstraZeneca vaccine, which is not yet OK'd in the U.S. That led some countries to limit its use to certain age groups. Also Tuesday, J&J delayed its imminent European rollout.

These are not typical blood clots. They’re weird in two ways.

First, they’re occurring in unusual parts of the body, such as veins that drain blood from the brain. Second, those patients also have abnormally low levels of platelets -- cells that help form clots -- a condition normally linked to bleeding, not clotting.

Scientists in Norway and Germany first raised the possibility that some people are experiencing an abnormal immune system response to the AstraZeneca vaccine, forming antibodies that attack their own platelets. That’s the theory as the U.S. now investigates clots in J&J vaccine recipients, Dr. Peter Marks, the Food and Drug Administration’s vaccine chief, said Tuesday.

The first clue: A widely used blood thinner named heparin sometimes causes a very similar side effect. Very rarely, heparin recipients form antibodies that both attack and overstimulate platelets, said Dr. Geoffrey Barnes, a clot expert at the University of Michigan.

“It kind of can cause both sides of the bleeding-clotting spectrum,”...

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