On the face of it, after a long wait for Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine test, the results reported on Friday, January 29, may have been disappointing. Its effectiveness – its ability to prevent moderate and severe disease – was 72 percent in the United States, 66 percent in Latin American countries, and 57 percent in South Africa.
Those numbers are much lower than those established by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, the first two vaccines to be licensed for emergency use in the United States, which reported efficacy between 94 and 95 percent.
Anthony Fauci, the country’s foremost infectious disease expert and now President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser on issues related to the coronavirus pandemic, acknowledged the notable difference at a press conference on Friday, Jan. 29.
“If you woke up and said, ‘Well, if I go to the left door I get 94 or 95 percent, if I go to the right door I get 72 percent.” Which door would you choose? ”He asked.
But Fauci assured that the most crucial indicator was the ability to prevent serious illness, meaning people are not hospitalized and deaths are avoided. And in that regard, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine reported 85 percent in all countries where it was tested, including South Africa, where a fast-spreading variant of the virus has shown some ability to escape vaccines.
More important than preventing “some aches and pains,” Fauci explains, is defense against serious illness, especially in people with underlying conditions and older adults, who are more likely to become seriously ill and die from COVID-19 .
“If you can prevent serious illness in a high percentage of people, it will greatly alleviate the stress of human suffering and death from this pandemic that we are seeing, especially at this time,” added Fauci. “As we all know, our healthcare system has been affected in recent weeks by the number of people needing both hospitalization and intensive care.”
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, compared the ability to prevent serious illness with the effects of flu vaccines, which do not always prevent flu completely, but do make it less severe.
“The same seems to be happening here, in a situation where this variant of the virus is clearly making it a bit more difficult to get the strongest response you would like to get,” Collins said. “But still, with a serious illness, he looks great.”
Moderna’s vaccine also showed high efficacy, 100 percent, against severe cases of the disease. The Pfizer-BioNTech also reported similar numbers, but the total number of serious cases in the study was too small to be definitive.
However, the researchers caution that trying to compare efficacy between new and previous studies can be misleading, as the virus is developing rapidly and tests have studied different pathogens to some extent.
“You have to recognize that Pfizer and Moderna have an advantage,” said William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, in an interview. “They did their clinical tests before the variants of the strain became apparent. Johnson & Johnson not only tested their vaccine against the standard strain, but they also had the variants. “
The best way to stop the spread of mutations and prevent new ones from forming is to vaccinate as many people as possible as soon as possible, Fauci and other researchers explain. Viruses cannot mutate unless they replicate, and they cannot replicate unless they can enter cells. Keeping them at bay by immunizing humans can stop the process.
In addition to the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines already in use in the United States, three more will be available soon: those made by Novavax, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca. The use of the AstraZeneca vaccine has already been approved in the UK and other countries.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is expected to play an important role around the world, but especially in low- and middle-income countries, as it works with just one dose, is more or less cheap, and easier to store and distribute than the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna because they don’t share their strict freezing and refrigeration requirements.
People waiting to be vaccinated may wonder if they will have a choice between vaccines, and if they should stick them out and wait for the one that suits them best to become available.
Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia, told CNN that if there were an abundant supply of Pfizer-BioNtech and Moderna vaccines, it would be his first choice because of their overall higher efficacy.
But for now, there aren’t enough of those vaccines.
If you can’t get the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine, you would choose the Johnson & Johnson shot, Offit said, as long as the data the company will provide to the Food and Drug Administration is as good as the data provided by the Friday.
Offit said Johnson & Johnson’s report on reducing serious illness was a powerful benefit.
“That’s what you’re looking for,” Offit added. “You want to be away from the hospital, away from the morgue.”
The doctor noted that the company was also studying a two-injection treatment, which could increase the effectiveness of the vaccine.
People opting for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine should be able to safely get a Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine later if a booster shot is needed, he added.
But Schaffner cautioned there was no data on the effects of receiving different types of vaccines. “We have not studied this,” he said.
Schaffner said he had just attended a meeting with other public health experts and they asked each other what they would tell their husbands or partners to do if they could get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine tomorrow, or wait three weeks for Pfizer. . -BioNTech or Moderna.
“We all said, ‘Get tomorrow,’” said Schaffner. ‘The virus is bad. You risk another three weeks of exposure instead of getting protection tomorrow. ‘
He said Johnson & Johnson’s 85 percent efficacy against the severe version of the disease was slightly lower than that reported by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, “but still quite high.”
Denise Grady has been a science reporter for the Times since 1998. She wrote Deadly invaders, a book about new viruses. @Newsurvey