Why Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot Covid-19 vaccine is a game changer
March 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-coronavirus
Excerpts 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.
This article seems like it was written by a guy who owns Johnson and Johnson stock. First off, Moderna and Pfizer were approved months ago and over 70 million people just in the US have already gotten the earlier shots who are now immuned and adding to the herd immunity. J&J was just approved. People are just starting to get them.
Second, the argument that so many people aren't;lt getting their second shot is not true. I'm in a group of old people, the more vulnerable, and no one that I know is not getting their second shot. Old people are particularly getting their shots because of the danger. They're fighting to get in line.
Here's an extract from the article you linked to of people taking the two-shot versions. Also, Moderna and Pfizer with just the first of two doses are more effective than J&J's one dose. The first two are at 95% while J&J is somewhere between 10-20% less effective. So, I think some balance should be included in your post.
In the first analysis, 88% had completed the series, 8.6% had not received the second dose but remained within the allowable interval, and 3.4% had missed the second dose. The percentage of people who missed the second dose was highest among American Indian/Alaska Natives (5.1%) and people aged 16 to 44 years (4%), according to CDC researcher Jennifer Kriss, and colleagues.
