Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccine works, California executives say

One by Thursday morning, several of California’s top public health officials sat in a white folding chair at the mass vaccination site in the parking lot of the Oakland Coliseum. They sat patiently, arms exposed, as a worker dabbed their skin and injected them with Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine – all in front of a row of more than a dozen TV cameras, plus more photographers and journalists.

It was an effort to show state leaders are putting their money where they are when they tout the effectiveness and importance of the newly approved single-injection vaccine.

“I want every Californian to have the utmost confidence that this vaccine and the three vaccines that have been approved are safe and effective,” California surgeon general Nadine Burke Harris said after being vaccinated, noting that her mother had also received one. Johnson & Johnson dose a few days earlier. “My colleagues and I looked at the data. We looked at the science and the research. This vaccine is so good – it’s good enough for my mom, it’s good enough for me.

The ‘unique’ Johnson & Johnson vaccine, as state epidemiologist Erica Pan called it after receiving her vaccine, has tremendous potential to protect groups who have been hit hard by the coronavirus, but which can be difficult to be achieved by public health officials.

This is because the vaccine is stored in a regular refrigerator, instead of the super cold room required by Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, making it easier to distribute to community clinics or take doses in rural areas. Her single-dose regimen also means health officials need to reach people just once, instead of scheduling a second date.

California has started receiving hundreds of thousands of doses of Johnson & Johnson and expects the supply to increase significantly over the next month. Pediatrician and Pastor Donna White Carey said her church in West Oakland plans to start running immunization clinics with doses of Johnson & Johnson four days a week for the next four weeks, which could allow 5,000 people to get sick. get vaccinated.

To realize this potential, however, the public must trust scientists when they say the Johnson & Johnson vaccine works – and that all vaccines are safe and necessary.

“The sooner we get to community immunity, the sooner we will end this pandemic,” said Tomás Aragón, director of the California Department of Public Health. “We all want to start hugging our families and friends again. We all want to go back to school, we want to go back to sports. “

Clinical trials of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have shown that it has slightly lower levels of efficacy than the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. The researchers say these studies cannot be compared directly because they were conducted under different circumstances and at different times during the pandemic; they pointed out that trials have shown Johnson & Johnson’s injections to be very effective in preventing serious illness and death from COVID.

But public health officials fear people will miss out on opportunities to take a Johnson & Johnson vaccine because they think it’s not as effective and choose to stick with Pfizer or Moderna. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said last week he turned down thousands of doses of Johnson & Johnson because he believed they were not “the best.”

This label could prove particularly damaging in Latinx and black communities, where COVID cases and deaths have been disproportionately high, and where the state is working with community health groups to build confidence in the three vaccines and highlight that Johnson & Johnson is not a second shot.

Thursday’s event at the Colosseum, which involved a diverse group of state leaders speaking to the public in English and Spanish, showed officials are taking this concern seriously.

“People ask me, ‘What is the best vaccine? “Said Aragón. “The first one in your arm – that’s the best vaccine.”