The COVID States Project #48: Assessing the impact of the pause in Johnson & Johnson vaccine use on COVID-19 vaccination intent
On April 13, the FDA and CDC recommended a pause in the use of the Johnson and Johnson (J&J) COVID-19 vaccine. This followed reports of a rare type of blood clot emerging in a small number of individuals following the use of the vaccine. This action raised serious concerns and criticisms of these agencies that the pause might lead to an increase in vaccine hesitancy and resistance in the United States.1In this report, we evaluate the likely impact of the pause on vaccine resistance. We do this through two types of analyses, both of which took advantage of the fact that we began fielding our survey on April 1st, collecting over 8,000 responses before the April 13th pause, and continued beyond the April 23 suspension of the pause. The first analysis compares responses of individuals who participated in the survey before the pause to those who participated after the pause, to assess whether there was a post-pause change in intentions to vaccinate. For the second analysis, we conducted a smaller “panel” survey following the pause, re-interviewing a subset of respondents who had participated in our survey before April 13th and indicated that they were not yet vaccinated. This allows an evaluation of whether particular individuals changed their view toward vaccination from shortly before the pause to shortly after the pause. Below, we first evaluate the public awareness of the pause, and then turn to analyses of changes in vaccine attitudes in each of these samples.