Second dose of Johnson & Johnson vaccine increases protection against covid-19, maker says
Source: Washington Post
A second shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine boosts protection against symptomatic and severe covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, the drug company announced early Tuesday. Those booster shots also generated additional antibodies, molecules churned out by the immune system to help fight off infections.
“It’s very exciting news,” said Vanderbilt University Medical Center infectious-diseases and preventive-medicine professor William Schaffner, though he cautioned that not all the data had been seen and that information must be reviewed by the Food and Drug Administration before recommendations can be made. “The people who received J&J have been a little concerned that they’ve been left in the shade when it comes to repeat vaccination,” Schaffner said. These results, as presented, seem to signal that those vaccine recipients might “expect a booster in their future,” he said.
Under the FDA’s emergency use authorization, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is given as a single dose, unlike the two shots required for full immunization with the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna mRNA vaccines. Results published this summer indicate that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine generates lasting amounts of antibodies able to target the delta variant and other variants of concern. In June and July, when delta was ascendant, the effectiveness of the one-shot vaccine was 78 percent against observed covid-19, according to a report published Thursday that has not yet gone through peer review.
A second dose, given 56 days after the first, further improves protection, the company said in a news release Tuesday. According to the company’s Ensemble 2 study, a Phase 3 randomized clinical trial, efficacy was 100 percent against severe or critical covid-19 when assessed at least two weeks after the booster. Efficacy against symptomatic disease was 94 percent in the United States and 75 percent globally. “We now have generated evidence that a booster shot further increases protection against covid-19 and is expected to extend the duration of protection significantly,” Johnson & Johnson chief scientific officer Paul Stoffels said in a statement.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/09/21/johnson-and-johnson-booster-shot/
I thought i had heard this on the radio when I was out running errands earlier this mroning and finally got chance to find an article.
For all those Janssen (J&J) recipients!
= new reply since forum marked as read
