Less can be more when it comes to rolling out a coronavirus vaccine.
Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine could be ahead of Pfizer and Moderna shots – even though it’s still weeks away from US approval, Wall Street analysts told The Post.
That’s because the single jabs will likely be easier to distribute across the country than the two-dose regimes of the rivals that are slowly falling into the arms of the Americans.
“They are not that late, given that they are shooting for a single-dose vaccine, which will certainly be much more convenient,” CFRA Research analyst Sel Hardy told The Post. “They have clear advantages in terms of logistics.”
J&J expects to release data from its large-scale vaccine study in late January, asking the FBI to release the shot for emergencies soon after. That would put it about two months behind Pfizer and Moderna, which got emergency approvals in mid-December.
J&J is also studying a two-dose regimen, but just one dose generated an immune response in more than 90 percent of the participants in an early clinical trial.
That means each dose the New Jersey-based company produces could inoculate one person, doubling its impact compared to the Pfizer and Moderna jabs, according to Third Bridge’s Jeylan Mammadova.
“When I say that I have the capacity to produce a billion doses … that’s a billion people you vaccinate” with a single vaccine, said Mammadova, the investment research firm’s global health team leader. “If I make the same statement with Moderna and with Pfizer, that’s only half.”
There is another important difference: J & J’s injection induces an immune response in the body by delivering a gene for the coronavirus ‘spike’ proteins via a cold virus that cannot make the recipient sick. This is a different method from the so-called messenger RNA found in the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.
The J&J technology already has a strong track record – it was used to develop the company’s Ebola vaccine that European Union regulators approved last July. That could help reassure people who are skeptical of the brand new COVID-19 shots, according to analysts.
“Although they are late, some people may think, ‘Okay, they’re using a traditional vaccine platform,'” Hardy said. “There could also be a trust problem, a perception problem, I would say, that could work in their favor.”
In addition, J & J’s vaccine is expected to have a longer shelf life than Moderna’s and not require ultra-cold storage like Pfizer’s, which must be kept at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit to be effective.
J&J estimates that the vaccine will remain stable for at least three months at standard refrigerator temperatures and for two years in a freezer at minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. Modernas, on the other hand, can last up to 30 days in the refrigerator and up to six months if frozen.
Despite these clear benefits, analysts do not expect the vaccine to have a major impact on J & J’s bottom line. The company has said it plans to make the shot available on a “non-profit basis for emergency use,” and it received approximately $ 454 million in research and development funding from the US government.
J&J will also eventually have to compete with other single-dose COVID vaccines from companies such as Merck, which is further behind in development.
“I don’t think it makes any difference financially [J&J] even if it’s a fantastic win, ”Sam Fazeli, senior pharmaceutical analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, told The Post. “The question is whether this is something they can make money with after the pandemic.”