‘There’s a lot of good things about this vaccine’
Health officials says Johnson & Johnson single shot will be easier to distribute
The first doses of Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot COVID-19 vaccine have been shipped and though it is unclear when it will arrive in the Lehigh Valley, local health care providers and public health experts say it will be a game-changer that will speed the vaccination process.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was approved Saturday for emergency use authorization in people 18 years and older by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It’s the first vaccine approved by the U.S. government since the Moderna vaccine in December and is the only one approved in the U.S. that requires just one shot.
COVID-19 vaccine providers throughout the U.S. are expected to receive the first doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine as early as Tuesday morning. Maggie Barton, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Health Department, said the state plans to announce details this week on its rollout.
Lehigh Valley Health Network
spokesperson Brian Downs and St. Luke’s University Health Network spokesperson Sam Kennedy said the health networks were waiting for the state to inform them when they will receive their first shipment of the new vaccine. The Allentown and Bethlehem health bureaus are waiting to learn if and when they will get doses of the Johnson & Johnson shot.
Chrysan Cronin, director and assistant professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, said the new vaccine is a gamechanger.
“The more people vaccinated, the closer we are to getting back to some semblance of normalcy,” Cronin said. “There’s a lot of good things about this vaccine that the other two don’t have.”
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is different from the COVID-19 vaccines manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna in a number of ways. First, it requires only one dose, whereas the other two require two shots that must be taken several weeks apart for full effectiveness. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine also has less stringent refrigeration requirements than its counterparts, which require storage at temperatures well below freezing.
Cronin said vaccinators are having difficulty getting people to come back for their second shot, as well as having difficulty reserving doses for the second vaccine. Because the vaccine doesn’t need the strict cooling requirement, it will be easier to transport and distribute, Cronin said.
“You can travel with it and refrigerator trucks and give it out in mobile vans,” Cronin said. “The distribution of this is going to be much simpler because of that temperature requirement.”
It is somewhat difficult to
compare the efficacy of Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccines to the Johnson & Johnson one.
During clinical trials, Pfizer and Moderna sought to determine how effective their vaccines were at protecting against any type of symptomatic COVID-19 infection. After the second doses, the Pfizer vaccine is 95% effective at preventing symptomatic COVID-19 illness and the Moderna vaccine is 94% effective.
Johnson & Johnson’s clinical trials aimed to determine how effective it was at protecting against moderate to severe COVID-19 illness. Clinical trials in the U.S. showed it was 72% effective at preventing moderate to severe illness, and it was found to be 66% effective across all eight countries trials were conducted in. It was shown to be 85% effective at preventing severe illness from COVID-19 in all eight countries.
Cronin said people should
not view the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as inferior to the Moderna or Pfizer products. Cronin added that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been shown to be effective against the variants that were discovered in the United Kingdom and South Africa. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were tested and approved for use before these variants became prevalent.
“It’s absolutely an excellent vaccine,” Cronin said. “Personally I would have not a single concern getting the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. In fact, I probably would prefer that one.”
The new vaccine also differs from the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine in how it teaches the body to fight against the coronavirus. Pfizer and Moderna products use messenger RNA to trigger an immune response, a method that had never been approved for use in a publicly available vaccine before. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine
uses a harmless adenovirus carrying genetic code from the coronavirus to trigger the necessary immune response. Johnson & Johnson previously used this method to make an Ebola vaccine.
Despite the differences, Downs said LVHN’s protocols for the Johnson & Johnson would be similar to those for other vaccines. However, he said the more lenient cooling requirements and single-shot nature of the newer vaccine would require LVHN to handle it somewhat differently. He added that the health network does not allow people to request which vaccine they receive. LVHN plans to use the vaccines as they are available without preference for one type of vaccine over another, Downs said.