Doctor on AstraZeneca vaccine: ‘It’s always a question of weighing the risks’

Europe’s drug regulator has found a link between the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine and blood clots. NeuroRX CEO & Johns Hopkins School of Medicine Adjunct Professor Dr. Jonathan Javitt joins Yahoo Finance Live to discuss.

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: European health regulators coming out today saying there is a direct link between AstraZeneca's COVID-19 vaccine and some patients who got that and also developed blood clots. That decision-- or that announcement from the European Medicines Agency, coming down just an hour ago. This comes as safety concerns about the vaccine has prompted more than a dozen countries to suspend its rollout.

Let's bring in Dr. Jonathan Javitt, CEO of NeuroRX and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine adjunct professor. We've also got Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani joining in on the conversation. Doctor, let me just first get your reaction to what we heard from the EMA, specifically what this means from a larger perspective of the vaccine rollout, especially in Europe, which has already been struggling to accelerate the process.

JONATHAN JAVITT: Well, I think it's important to recognize that the complication that's been identified, blood clots, while certainly severe, is classified as very rare. And any vaccine, any therapy is going to have side effects, is going to have rare and serious side effects. It's always a question of weighing the risks. And clearly, the risk of contracting COVID-19 far exceeds the potential risk of a blood clot from the vaccine. At the same time, if there are vaccines that are found to have a lower side effect profile, those are the ones that were likely to be used.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Doctor, Anjalee here. I know that you're working on a treatment for COVID. And I want to get into a little bit of that. From what I understand, it's delivered intravenously and is specifically for critical patients. Can you walk through why this is a good solution? I know that health experts, like the White House response team, has called for oral or easier to deliver treatments.

JONATHAN JAVITT: Well, the easier a treatment is to deliver, the better that is for patients. There's no question. And we've already started this study to use our treatment in earlier patients in inhaled form. At the same time, the people that we targeted in our first clinical trial are the people who have no other alternative, who have no life-saving alternative from critical and frequently lethal COVID-19. So it's fine to search for early or an easier to administer treatments. But first, we need to find treatments that can actually rescue somebody who's in the ICU and at immediate risk of death.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Right, and but on that note, looking at the delivery method, is there any thought about an easier delivery method? Or is IV the way that you're going to continue looking at this treatment?

JONATHAN JAVITT: Well, yeah, as I said, we've started a second clinical trial to use this drug in inhaled form. We started with the intravenous therapy because that's the way this drug was originally used in acute respiratory distress the last time it was used, which was 2005. So the FDA asked us to replicate that intravenous delivery and see if we could prove the benefit of the drug in that original form before we went to inhaled form or other ways of giving the drug. So we've done what the FDA asked. We've got data that we think is quite positive. And now we're moving forward to an inhaled version of the drug. We've already treated the first patients with inhaled drug.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Great, and what about the thoughts of use within the hospitals? I know that right now, many have said that they figured out how to treat patients better. Do you see a pretty big market still for this when we're getting around to, A, vaccinations more broadly, as well as, B, the idea that, you know, other drugs have already been used or other treatment strategies have already been used?

JONATHAN JAVITT: Well, sadly, there is no FDA-approved drug for patients who have COVID-19 respiratory failure and are in the ICU at immediate risk of death. The antiviral drugs certainly work well in the earlier patients. But the trial we did was in people who have exhausted all other remedies. And those people will continue to come into ICUs. There will continue to be resistant forms of COVID. This disease is not going away any time soon. Hopefully, the number of people that we treat will be smaller and smaller every year.

But remember that between 15,000 and 50,000 Americans die in ICUs of influenza every year. These viruses that can affect the lungs are deadly viruses. And we need treatments that can rescue people from them.

ZACK GUZMAN: You know, doctor, on that point, I mean, as we talk about vaccines getting moved up, President Biden talking about moving those goals up to mid-April, I'd be curious to get maybe your expectations for how the FDA might change the approval process here, too. Because earlier on, it seemed like they were willing to take some chances with emergency use authorization on these things. But now that we're kind of at where we're at in the vaccination point, does that maybe change your expectations?

JONATHAN JAVITT: Certainly, the public health emergency is a very real public health emergency. Emergency use is triggered by the declaration of the Secretary of Health and Human Services that we're in a public health emergency. So we certainly hope that FDA will continue to give emergency use authorization because that's what Congress established.

ZACK GUZMAN: All right, Dr. Jonathan Javitt, CEO of NeuroRX, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine adjunct professor, alongside Yahoo Finance's Anjalee Khemlani, appreciate you both for the time.