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Dr Anthony Fauci, the federal government’s senior immunologist, said on Friday that a third coronavirus vaccine would add a needed tool to the country’s arsenal against the pandemic, despite its low rate of effectiveness in research trials.
The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases spoke about the Johnson & Johnson single-injection vaccine, which is expected to be submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization as early as next week, when ‘an interview on “Nightly News with Lester Holt” Friday.
“The protection against serious illness is very high,” he said.
The vaccine has a 72% effective rate in preventing symptomatic Covid-19, Johnson & Johnson said earlier today. This compares to 95% for the Pfizer vaccine and 94% for the Moderna version.
The J&J vaccine does not require cold storage unusually necessary for others and only requires basic refrigeration, the company said. The other two also require a second hit.
“From a practical point of view,” Fauci said, “… to keep people out of the hospital and prevent death – that’s added value.”
The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines use messenger RNA to teach the immune system how to fight the coronavirus. Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine uses an inactivated adenovirus, a type of virus that causes the common cold, to do this.
Fauci doesn’t read the lower effective rate much. In a previous interview with the New York Press Club, he said: “Seventy-two percent effective would have been, ‘Wow'” if the J&J vaccine had been presented to the world before the others.
In fact, he said in “Nightly News with Lester Holt,” the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which he says produced no hospitalizations during the trials, has its benefits.
“You can just keep it in a refrigerator,” he says. “It’s relatively inexpensive. And the company can manufacture billions of doses.”
He said adding a third vaccine to the US arsenal cannot come soon enough, as inoculation will be the country’s most effective weapon against mutations, including version B.1.1.7 affiliated with the UK and a South African variant.
The J&J vaccine, however, was found to be only 57 percent emotional against the latter. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines can be modified to attack new variants, Fauci said.
Until the pandemic is under control, the virus will continue to mutate in an attempt to survive and thrive, Fauci said. A majority of Americans need to be vaccinated for normal life to return to fall, he said.
“It’s not about whether we can,” the doctor said. “We need to.”
Lester holt contributed.
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