DETROIT — The mayor changed course Friday and endorsed the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as “safe and effective” after he turned down 6,200 doses of it, insisting that only “the best” would do for his city, meaning the Pfizer and Moderna versions of the Covid-19 vaccine.
“I have full confidence that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is both safe and effective,” Mayor Mike Duggan said in a statement. “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.”
Later in the afternoon, Duggan released a statement in which he said the city "always intended to distribute Johnson & Johnson once the demand warranted it."
"The only reason we chose to not accept the first shipment of Johnson & Johnson was that we had enough capacity with Moderna and Pfizer to handle the 29,000 first and second dose appointments scheduled for the coming week," he said.
Duggan's course correction came after the senior adviser to the White House Covid-19 task force insisted that the mayor's remarks were a "misunderstanding."
"That was not actually the mayor's intent, and that was not the mayor's comment," Andy Slavitt told reporters Friday. "We've been in constant dialogue with Mayor Duggan who said, in fact, that was not what he said — or however it was reported."
But Duggan, a Democrat who had drawn mostly praise up until then for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and the vaccine rollout, was recorded comparing the effectiveness of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine during a Thursday news conference.
“Johnson & Johnson is a very good vaccine, Moderna and Pfizer are the best,” Duggan said. “And I am going to do everything I can to make sure the residents of the city of Detroit get the best.”
Duggan also said he’d be willing to use the Johnson & Johnson vaccine but only if Detroit runs out of the other brands.
“There may come a day when we have more Detroiters asking for vaccines than we have Moderna, Pfizer, in which case we’ll set up a Johnson & Johnson site,” Duggan said.
Not long after that, Duggan started getting an earful.
“Mike Duggan, whose lifeblood is strategic political calculus, has really miscalculated this time,” Chad Livengood wrote Friday in Crain’s Detroit Business. “The Detroit mayor’s rejection of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine for Covid-19 is both confounding and dangerous for Michigan’s fight against the insidious virus that has consumed our lives for the past 12 months.”
Public health experts like Dr. Sadiya Khan, an epidemiologist at the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, said Duggan is undermining public faith in the single-shot vaccine which has been shown to be effective against Covid-19.