Johnson & Johnson COVID vaccine effective, says California leaders

One by one Thursday morning, several of California’s top public health officials sat in a white folding chair at the mass vaccination site in the Oakland Coliseum parking lot. They sat patiently, exposing upper arms while a worker wiped their skin and injected the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine – all in front of a row of more than a dozen TV cameras, plus more photographers and reporters.

It was an attempt to indicate that state leaders put their money on their mouths when considering the efficacy and importance of the newly approved single-shot vaccine.

“I want every Californian to have the utmost confidence that this vaccine and all three of the approved vaccines are safe and effective,” California Surgeon General Nadine Burke Harris said after she was shot, noting that her mother also received a Johnson. & Johnson dose a few days earlier. “My colleagues and I checked the data. We looked at science and research. This vaccine is so good – it’s good enough for my mother, it’s good enough for me. ”

The ‘one-and-done’ Johnson & Johnson vaccine, as state epidemiologist Erica Pan called it after she was shot, has tremendous potential to protect groups hard hit by the coronavirus, but it can be difficult to publicize to reach health officials.

This is because the vaccine is stored in a regular refrigerator, instead of the super-cold storage required by the vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, which makes it easier to distribute at community clinics or take doses to rural areas. The single-dose regimen also means that health officials only need to reach people once instead of planning a second appointment.

California has started receiving hundreds of thousands of doses of Johnson & Johnson, and expects supply to increase significantly over the next month. Pediatrician and pastor Donna White Carey said her church in West Oakland plans to hold vaccination clinics with Johnson & Johnson doses four days a week for the next four weeks, which could get 5,000 people vaccinated.

To realize the potential, however, the public needs to trust scientists when they say that the Johnson & Johnson shot works – and that all vaccines are safe and necessary.

“The sooner we get community immunity, the sooner we will be done with this pandemic,” said California Department of Public Health Tomás Aragón. “All of us want to go back to embracing our families and friends. All of us want to go back to school, we want to go to sports again. ”

Clinical trials of the Johnson & Johnson shot have shown that it has slightly lower efficacy than vaccinations from Pfizer and Moderna. Researchers say the studies cannot be compared head-on because they were conducted under different circumstances and at different times during the pandemic; they stressed that the trials showed that Johnson & Johnson shots were very effective in preventing serious illness and death due to COVID.

But public health officials are worried that people may be given opportunities to take a Johnson & Johnson shot because they think it is not as effective, and prefer to keep Pfizer or Moderna out. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said last week that he turned down thousands of doses of Johnson & Johnson because he believes it is not “the best”.

This label can be particularly harmful in Latinx and Black communities, where COVID cases and deaths have been excessively high, and where the state works with community health groups to create trust in all three vaccines and to emphasize Johnson & Johnson is not a second-rate not shot.

Thursday’s rally at the Coliseum, which involved a diverse group of state leaders, addressed the public in both English and Spanish, showed officials taking the concerns seriously.

I’m asked, ‘What is the best vaccine? ‘, Aragon said. “The first one in your arm – it’s the best vaccine.”