Jody Liebmann resides in Detroit, which means her mayor turned down 6,200 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine when less than 9 percent of the city has been vaccinated
“Feeling isolated and forgotten,” she tweeted on Friday. “The @CityofDetroit (my city) Mike Duggan received his Covid vaccine on Dec. 22. He said yesterday the J&J vaccine wasn’t good enough for Detroit. I’ve been stuck at home for 10 months. This is absurd!”
She was tweeting as someone whose daughter is 30 weeks pregnant and caught COVID-19 two months ago. The absurdity of Duggan’s position is doubled when you consider that the J&J vaccine requires only one shot, whereas the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines that he deemed superior require two.
ADVERTISEMENT
All three vaccines are regarded by experts as extremely effective. One big difference is Detroit would have needed 12,400 doses of Moderna and Pfizer spaced over at least three weeks to protect the 6,200 people that the J&J allocation would have covered immediately.
Liebmann suggested the proper standard by which a vaccine should be judged in a pandemic:“Anything that will keep you out of the hospital,”
She said of her mayor “He got his vaccine on Dec. 22. The rest of us are waiting.”
Duggan was vaccinated on live TV three days before Christmas with the avowed purpose of countering vaccine hesitancy. But as Liebmann sees it, Duggan had the opposite effect when he declared on Thursday that one of the vaccines does not quite measure up to the other two.
“So many people are leery of vaccines,” she said. “That’s going to scare people off.”
Vaccine hesitancy must be addressed with some tact and delicacy. Nobody harboring doubts would have been much reassured to hear Duggan say, “Johnson & Johnson is a very good vaccine. Moderna and Pfizer are the best. And I am going to do everything I can to make sure that residents of the city of Detroit get the best.”
Liebmann was not alone in finding this absurd. White House COVID-19 senior adviser Andy Slavitt could have just offered the same opinion. He instead told the press at a briefing late Friday morning that Duggan had not said what the mayor had in fact said.
“I do think it’s important to clarify that that was not actually the mayor’s intent, and that was not the mayor’s comment,” Slavitt said. “We’ve been in constant dialogue with Mayor Duggan, who said, in fact, that was not what he said or — however it was reported.”
Slavitt continued straight-faced, “In fact, he is very eager for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. And I think we would reiterate the message that, for all of us, the first vaccine we have an opportunity to take makes absolute sense to take. So thank you for allowing us to clarify that.”
Dr. Anthony Fauci then weighed in.
“We have three highly efficacious vaccines with a very good safety profile,” Fauci said. “Each of them is very effective in preventing clinically apparent disease, but importantly, all three of them have a very important effect of being extraordinarily effective in preventing severe disease and particularly preventing hospitalizations and deaths… We’ve got to get away from this issue of comparing one with the other except to say that we have a highly efficacious group of three vaccines.”
Fauci said of the J&J vaccine, “In the important area of preventing against very severe disease leading to hospitalization and death, it is virtually 100 percent in that regard. That is really good news.”
He reiterated the advice offered by all knowledgeable health officials: “Just take the vaccine that is the most readily available to you.”
In Detroit, Duggan issued a statement unsaying what he had said.
“I have full confidence that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is both safe and effective. We are making plans now for Johnson & Johnson to be a key part of our expansion of vaccine centers and are looking forward to receiving Johnson & Johnson vaccines in the next allocation.”
Another statement later on Friday sounded as if Duggan had never declined an allocation of J & J vaccine.
“The city of Detroit is excited that there are now three highly effective vaccines that will save lives,” Duggan said. “The data from the clinical trials is clear—the FDA, the CDC and Dr. Fauci all have been clear—Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson are all highly effective at what we care about most, which is preventing hospitalizations and deaths.”
Liebmann welcomed the news that as a result of a push from the White House and maybe even tweets such as hers, Duggan had gone from absurd to aboard.
“I’m glad he did that,” she said.
And, as Liebmann’s husband rightly suggested, each vaccination of whatever brand is good for everybody.
“The longer you take to get any kind of vaccine, the more chance the virus has to mutate,” Jeff Liebmann said.
The husband is a 64-year-old retired minister and now runs an estate-closing business with his wife. That might seem to be a profitable endeavor in a city of 670,000 where 1,849 have died of COVID-19, but the economic impact of the pandemic has struck seemingly everybody.
The dead included their next-door neighbor’s mother. The neighbor had a party in July that gave a measure both of how hard Deroit had been hit and how oblivious too many people remain regarding essential precautions such as social distancing.
“A get-together of six friends who had lost a parent in the past three months from COVID,” Liebmann said. “Six of them.”
The good news is that Jeff Liebmann is nearing 65 and will be eligible to get a vaccine on March 20. Jody Liebmann is 53 and will likely have to wait.
“Hopefully by summer,” she said.
In the meantime, she needs only to hear an ambulance siren to remember a time of surging death last year when the air was constantly filled with them.
“That still freaks me out,” she said.
Her husband offered a bit of wisdom regarding vaccination during a pandemic that Mayor Duggan would be wise to heed.
“Anything that slows the process is just monumentally stupid,” Jeff Liebmann said.
