U.S. coronavirus: Johnson & Johnson vaccine is valuable weapon and rollout will be swift, officials say

But with variants spreading and threatening to send new case rates soaring once again, officials hope to get ahead with faster inoculations.

“We’ve had two vaccines and now it looks like we’re going to get three and that means we can get more doses on our arms and we can try to put this terrible pandemic behind us,” Dr Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said.

New cases of the coronavirus have started to stabilize after a steady decline, and Dr Rochelle Walensky, director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, warned that this could be the “first effects” of more transmissible variants having an impact.

“The CDC has sounded the alarm over the continued spread of variants in the United States,” she said during a White House briefing Friday.

Misconceptions that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is ‘second class’

All 22 members of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biologics Advisory Committee voted unanimously to recommend the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which one member said was an “easy call.”

“It clearly exceeds the bar and it’s good to have a single dose vaccine,” said Dr. Eric Rubin, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and professor at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

But some officials fear the public will misunderstand just how good the vaccine is and view it as “second-class” – a misconception that public health leaders will need to address.

“It’s difficult to make an apple-apple comparison between licensed vaccines, based on data collected before new variants were said to have been widely released,” said Sarah Christopherson, director of policy advocacy at the National Women’s Health Network.

While Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine may appear to have a lower efficacy rate than its previous counterparts, that doesn’t make it a worse option, as the latter appears to protect against some of the virus variants, another said. member of the committee recommending the vaccine.

“One dose will keep you from being released from the hospital, keep you out of the intensive care unit, and keep you out of the morgue,” Dr. Paul Offit told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.

Several public health experts told Congress on Friday that people who have the Johnson & Johnson vaccine available to them should get it.

“If I had a J&J vaccine available today and a Moderna vaccine available tomorrow, I would be happy to take the J&J vaccine today. I don’t feel like I would need to wait. These are all great vaccines for the things we care about, ”Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, said in a House Health Subcommittee hearing. ways and means.

No time to change the dose

Promising news has also been published for the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine.

A single dose can induce an immune response strong enough in people who have previously had Covid-19 that it can protect against future infection, according to two new articles published in The Lancet on Thursday.

The vaccine is currently given in two doses, 21 days apart. The first dose triggers the immune system and the second stimulates it to protect it against Covid-19.

Some officials have suggested giving priority to the administration of the first doses, in order to rapidly increase the immune response of as many people as possible.

But with the variants emerging, now is not the time to change the two-dose schedule for the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, said Dr Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the CDC, during from a conversation with the Journal of the American Medical Association, Friday.

“The vaccines have been studied and approved, licensed, recommended as a two-dose schedule. Our programs are built on that. We communicated it to the public, ”she said. “I just don’t think there is enough science yet to tell us now is the time to change what we know to be an effective diet.”