Johnson & Johnson vaccine: Local family's sorrow coincides with pause over blood-clot worries

On March 12, Elizabeth Aumann of Amberley Village got her long-awaited shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine against COVID-19. Three days later, she was hospitalized with a ferocious headache. Her condition deteriorated until March 24, when she died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

Her husband of 36 years, Bob, stressed in an interview Tuesday that he does not tie his wife’s death to the J&J drug. She did live with a rare blood-clotting disorder and used medication for high blood pressure. But Bob said even her doctors are mystified about her swift end. At 60, Liz Aumann was fit and a 20-mile-a-week runner with a busy executive job at the University of Cincinnati.

“Several people asked me, was her death related to the vaccine, which we couldn’t answer,” he said. “The doctors don’t know why or where she had this bleed. Needless to say, it was fatal.”

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One family’s sorrow coincided Tuesday with the federal and state halts on the distribution of the J&J vaccine to review blood clotting incidents in six women between 18 and 48 who received the shot. One woman died, another received hospital treatment. More than 7.2 million doses of the J&J drug (sometimes known as the Janssen vaccine, after the J&J subsidiary that makes it) have been given since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized its emergency use last month.

Aumann’s death is not counted among those six cases although her family alerted the CDC April 1 through the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System. One reason the government pauses the distribution of a drug is to learn whether others also have suffered the rare reaction.

The CDC system says 1,170 total deaths have been reported after inoculation with the Moderna vaccine, in use since January; 1,050 with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, in use since December, and 54 with the J&J drug, in use since early March.

“The end result is, it doesn’t change my outcome,” Bob Aumann said. “I have no proof that her death is related to any of the vaccine stuff. I don’t know. I’m sure all these companies are doing as much research as they can. I don’t think they were just randomly throwing a product out, but obviously, only time will tell what the negative impacts will be.”

The Aumanns met as students at Miami University and raised sons Matthew and Joshua in Mason. Bob owned the prototyping business 3-D Technical Services. Liz earned two master’s degrees from UC and was the university’s executive director of benefits, compensation and human resources operations. She helped create UC's wellness program, coming to campus in 2008 after 22 years at Ohio Casualty Group. UC officials did not respond to requests Tuesday for comment about Aumann.

“She was never sick,” Bob said. “I don’t think she’s missed a day from work except when the boys were born. No sick days for 20, 30 years. That’s why this was such a shocker.”

Several years ago, Bob can’t remember when, Liz was diagnosed with polycythemia vera, a rare disease in which the body makes too many blood cells. “As I understand it, her blood would get thicker, and then they would draw it off, and then the body would make new blood, and the sequence would repeat itself. She had recently started taking some high blood pressure medication” to give her heart some help in its pumping.

Even Tuesday, Bob didn’t know more than that. “Liz was a very private person. She would tell me something once, and then she wouldn’t want to talk about it anymore. If I didn’t hear and remember what she said, well, that was my one opportunity to know what was going on.”

Liz had searched for a vaccination as soon as her age group was eligible in March, and Bob said she got the J&J shot at a pharmacy in Colerain Township. He remembered that she felt chills that night. On March 15, “she called, ‘I’m sick, I’m throwing up, you need to come,’ and I thought, this is really strange.”

Bob drove her to Bethesda North Hospital in Montgomery, where doctors discovered the mysterious bleed on the brain and sent her to Good Samaritan Hospital in University Heights for neurosurgery, “the beginning of the end,” Bob said. On March 24, the family removed life support, “and she died within five minutes.” In hope of answers, Bob allowed an autopsy, but he does not have the results.

The funeral is scheduled for Saturday at the Aumanns' church, Heritage Presbyterian in Mason. In bereavement, Bob can share funny memories, like the night he met Liz at Miami.

“It was Halloween in Oxford, Ohio, and we were uptown at a bar called Ozzie's,” he said. “I was sitting at the bar, and she was sitting with her roommates, and she was the one who kept coming up for a pitcher of beer. I would talk with her, and the next time, I would talk with her a little bit longer, and the next time a little longer, and finally one of her roommates came up and said, 'hey, our beer’s getting warm.' ”

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