Welcome to the lead this Friday, I'm Jake Tapper, and we start today with our health lead

because any minute we're expecting a group of CDC advisors to decide how and whether,

frankly, to move forward with the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine.

Right now, some of the leading experts in infectious diseases in public health are debating

if the U.S. should resume using the J&J vaccine, perhaps with an added warning for specific

groups and individuals, or to continue to stop allowing the administration of the vaccine

and to make it permanent. The CDC recommended a pause on the vaccine last week, you'll recall,

while it investigated a potential link between the shot and a very serious and very rare kind of

blood clot. And more than 7 million Americans have received the J&J vaccine almost all without

any severe complications, but there are at least 15 vaccine recipients out of those 7 million

who developed the blood clotting condition, and three of them died. Today, Johnson & Johnson

executives admitted that a link between its vaccine and blood clots is, quote, plausible, but they

argued the shot is valuable because it's easy to distribute, and it protects against variants

as CNN's Alexander Field now reports. We need to act swiftly after that analysis.

The fate of Johnson & Johnson's single shot vaccine right now in the hands of a CDC advisory

committee expected to issue new guidance soon that will likely put J&J back into arms.

I do think that there's plenty of people who are interested in the J&J vaccine if just for convenience,

as well as for a single dose option. That guidance may also come with a new warning added to the

product about the possible risk of extremely rare blood clots. They will allow it to be given

because they feel that the risk of COVID-19 far outweighs the very rare, rare occurrence

of this serious adverse event. In the US, 10 days after a decision to pause use of J&J,

regulators are still considering the evidence in their investigation of 15 cases of rare and

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