Why Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot Covid-19 vaccine is a game changerMarch 1, 2021 -
The vaccine is very effective — and most importantly, it only requires one shot.https://www.vox.com/covid-19-vaccine-johnson-and-johnson-coronavirusExcerpts below...
One big reason to be excited about the new Johnson & Johnson vaccine for Covid-19, which was authorized by the Food and Drug Administration over the weekend for emergency use in the US: Unlike the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines already in use, it requires only one shot for full protection.
That’s a big deal. From a practical standpoint, it means that the new vaccine could really speed up America’s vaccination campaign — certainly more than another two-dose vaccine would. It also fixes a problem that’s long bedeviled medical treatments that require multiple doses: A lot of patients tend to drop off after the first appointment.
“Especially when you’re trying to think about a massive public health program like this vaccine rollout, a single-dose vaccine would have made it much, much simpler” if it were the first to get approval, Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, told me.
Based on research that evaluated compliance with other multi-dose vaccines, patients are really, really bad at getting their second dose. Bad as in, as many as half of patients never do. Studies conducted in both the US and UK on the hepatitis B vaccine — which, like the Covid-19 vaccines, is supposed to have around a one-month period between the first and second doses — found that roughly 50 percent of patients failed to get their follow-up shot within a year after their first.Maybe the numbers will look better for the Covid-19 vaccines. The stakes of a deadly pandemic are much higher, and perhaps people will react accordingly. But if a significant number of people fail to get their second shots, and the first dose of Moderna’s and Pfizer’s vaccines proves to not be enough, that could doom the prospects of herd immunity, when enough of the population is vaccinated to stop the spread of the virus.
One of the most obvious benefits to a one-shot Covid-19 vaccine is it could dramatically speed up — literally double — the US’s vaccine rollout.
Now imagine that the US manages to get to 3 million shots a day (which no longer seems unlikely). At that rate, two-dose vaccines would get us to herd immunity at the end of the summer, and a one-shot–only approach would get us there before summer. If one-third of vaccines are one-shot versions, we reach herd immunity by mid-summer — leaving the rest of the summer to, hopefully, live much closer to normal than the last year.
But the numbers, at least, demonstrate the potential of a one-shot vaccine like Johnson & Johnson’s. It could speed up the vaccination process in the US by weeks or even months.
With thousands of people still dying every day from Covid-19, that boost could translate to upward of tens of thousands of lives saved.
