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March 13 – Thousands of doses of a new single-dose COVID-19 vaccine developed by pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson arrived in Alaska this week, and many Alaskan health officials point to data that shows that the new vaccine is a safe and effective option to protect Alaska from the coronavirus.
“This is another tool in the toolkit to help us fight COVID-19,” Dr. Bob Onders, administrator of the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage said Friday.
“The fact that it can be stored and transported in a standard refrigerator, and that it only requires a single dose, gives Alaskans more flexibility,” said Dr Anne Zink, chief medical officer of the state. , in a press release.
The J&J vaccine is the third to receive emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. Alaska’s vaccine allocation in March included 8,900 doses of Johnson & Johnson, in addition to more than 100,000 first doses of Moderna and Pfizer vaccine to the state this month.
Alaska this week became the first state to remove vaccine eligibility requirements by opening appointments for anyone 16 years of age or older who lives or works in the state – a move that was possible in part. because of the additional vaccine that arrived in the state this week.
As of Friday, more than a quarter of Alaskans had received a single shot of the vaccine, making Alaska one of the most vaccinated states in the country.
While the new vaccine began arriving this week, Alaskans have already been vaccinated with the single injection option.
The J&J vaccine, like the other two vaccines available, “has been shown to be effective for the things we really want to prevent: hospitalization and serious complications, including death from COVID-19,” Onders said. “What the CDC recommends that everyone get the first vaccine they have, and this is also what we recommend.”
Onders disputed an editorial on Friday published this week by a Seattle-based public health doctor who expressed doubts about clinical trial data, which he said appeared to suggest the new vaccine might not work as well for them. Alaskan natives.
Onders said the editorial was concerning, misleading and unsupported by data.
“The number of Alaska Natives and American Indians in the study, and what the author of the opinion commentary on, is too small to draw conclusions about whether the vaccine is better. for one group of people versus another group, ”Onders said. . “It’s unfortunate that there is an under-representation of Alaskan Natives and American Indians in the data, but what we do know is that it generally works very well across all groups.”
In J & J’s clinical trials, even though there were only a small number of Alaskan Natives and Native Americans included, the levels of severe complications from the virus and the rates of hospitalizations and deaths due to the virus fell further, Onders said.
“The other point is that he draws conclusions from the experience in Brazil, with the indigenous people of South America, and concludes that this may have an impact on the effectiveness for the natives of Alaska and the American Indians, ”Onders said. “But we don’t really know that. And I think Brazil is a unique situation where there are different variations in Brazil that can change the results” in the data.
“It’s concerning when people create unwarranted hesitation in a situation where we know the more people get vaccinated the better off we’ll be,” Onders added.
A joint rebuttal of the original editorial was recently published in Indian Country Today by a coalition of Indigenous health experts.
“Suggestions that a vaccine does not provide protection against COVID-19 for a particular racial group have no plausible biological basis and are not supported by the available evidence,” the second editorial said.
Although clinical trials have found that the J&J vaccine has slightly lower levels of efficacy than the two mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna, the researchers said it was difficult to compare these studies because they were performed at different times during the pandemic.
The flexibility that comes with the J&J vaccine “can make it easier to keep it in village clinics for longer periods of time because they don’t have ultra-cold freezers but they do have vaccine refrigerators,” Onders said.
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