Roxanne Khamsi

In 2021, just months after the first COVID vaccines debuted, concern was growing about an exceedingly rare but sometimes deadly outcome of certain shots. Two related vaccines—one from AstraZeneca and the other from Johnson & Johnson—were linked to dangerous blood clotting.
Out of almost 19 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s version given in the United States during the first two years of the pandemic, at least 60 such cases were identified. Nine of them were fatal.

On September 22 of last year, Michel Goldman, a Belgian immunologist and one of Europe’s best-known champions of medical research, walked into a clinic near his house, rolled up his sleeve, and had a booster shot delivered to his arm. He knew he’d need it more than most.Just a few weeks earlier, Michel, 67, had been to see his younger brother, Serge, the head of nuclear medicine at the hospital of the Université Libre de Bruxelles, where both men are professors.

In late February 2020, only a couple of weeks after the pandemic coronavirus disease had even received a formal name, a man with a terrible cough and fever showed up at one of the ProHealth Urgent Care centers in Queens, New York. At that point, no COVID-19 cases had yet been confirmed in New York City, but numbers were on the rise in spots across the country, and the man had recently been at a conference.

The U.S. fell short of its goal of giving at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine to 70 percent of adults by July 4, but not by much. About two-thirds of everyone above the age of 18 had gotten a shot when the holiday arrived, with coverage among seniors surpassing even that benchmark. That leaves kids—mostly unvaccinated—as the Americans most exposed to the pandemic this summer, while the Delta variant spreads. It’s said that COVID-19 may soon be a disease of the young.

For weeks, Americans looked on as other countries grappled with case reports of rare, sometimes fatal blood abnormalities among those who had received the AstraZeneca vaccine against COVID-19. That vaccine has not yet been authorized by the FDA, so restrictions on its use throughout Europe did not get that much attention in the United States.