CDC PANEL APPROVES USAGE OF ONE-DOSE VACCINE
Johnson & Johnson wins strong endorsement with shots to begin this week
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending the nation’s third coronavirus vaccine for people 18 and older, paving the way for the easier-to-use, one-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine to be administered starting this week.
The action follows a unanimous vote Sunday by the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel, which strongly endorsed the vaccine’s effectiveness in completely protecting against hospitalization and death. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is the first authorized in the United States that does not need to be kept frozen or followed by a second shot.
The clearance of a third vaccine comes at a critical inflection point in the pandemic: After weeks of steadily declining new cases in the United States, the downward trend has stalled — “a very concerning shift in the trajectory,” CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday. Experts worry that state and local officials are relaxing restrictions too quickly, and that people are letting down their guard even as virus variants are on the rise.
It was almost one year ago that authorities announced what was believed to be the first coronavirus death in the United States. Since then, the toll has risen to more than 500,000 deaths of COVID-19, the disease that can be caused by the coronavirus.
“COVID cases and deaths are decreasing,” said Beth Bell, a global health expert at the University of Washington who leads the panel’s coronavirus vaccine working group. “But the pandemic is very far from over and many challenges are before us. The need for more safe and effective vaccines remains urgent and vital to ending the pandemic.”
The action by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices fol
lows the Food and Drug Administration’s action Saturday authorizing the vaccine for emergency use for people 18 and older. The FDA action permits a vaccine to be used, while the CDC recommends to health providers how it should be used. In adopting the panel’s recommendation Sunday, Walensky called it “another milestone toward an end to the pandemic.”
The doses are expected to start shipping as early as today to sites receiving doses of the authorized vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna. Those locations include state health departments, pharmacies, federally qualified health centers and community vaccination centers.
Johnson & Johnson’s initial supply will be limited — 3.9 million doses are expected to be shipped this week, with an estimated 20 million doses by the end of March, officials have said. State officials already know what to expect because the number of anticipated doses for all three vaccines was included in information they received last week.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was 85 percent effective at protecting against severe cases of illness in latestage trials, and there were no deaths or hospitalizations a month after participants received the vaccine. The vaccine was slightly less effective at preventing moderate illness (72 percent effective in the U.S.), where more-transmissible variants have recently begun to be detected.
Some experts worry that the public will fixate on that data point and pass up getting the Johnson & Johnson shot in favor of other vaccines that underwent trials at an earlier stage of the pandemic, when such variants were not a factor.
Officials stressed that the three authorized vaccines were not compared head-to-head. They were tested at different times, against different circulating variants and in settings with different levels of transmission.
“While there are differences in efficacy of the three vaccines for moderate illness, the more severe the outcome, the more similar the efficacy,” said Saad Omer, director of the Yale University Institute for Global Health, who is not a member of the panel.