FLORIDA — With President Biden’s vaccination plan in motion, a new vaccine could be joining the fray very soon.
What You Need To Know
- Currently the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are approved for use in the United States
- Johnson & Johnson is awaiting results from Phase 3 of its clinical trials and could soon be applying for emergency use authorization
- Unlike the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, J&J’s is a single-shot vaccine, which could be a game changer in the pandemic
Johnson & Johnson has developed a single shot vaccine that’s currently awaiting results from phase 3 of its clinical trials.
Those results are expected to be released next week, and medical experts say this vaccine could change the game when it comes to distribution.
Lisa Cuatt fought off COVID-19 once.
“The issue was though for about two months after,” she said. “I’m a runner, and I was so out of breath. I’d walk up a flight of stairs and I’d be short of breath.
“It took me about a good two months to get back to feeling my normal self.”
She says once was more than enough.
So even if she has to get a shot twice, she’s eager to get the vaccine.
But with a new vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, all it takes is one shot.
If it gets the thumbs up, President Joe Biden’s plan to distribute vaccinate at least 100 million vaccinations in 100 days could look even more promising.
“The biggest implication is this is another option. This is more capacity. This has easier, ease of administration,” said Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar with Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “So this should be something that could significantly impact the speed with which we vaccinate the American public.”
Adalja says Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine is different from Moderna’s and Pfizer’s vaccine in several ways.
It only requires one shot to do the job.
It doesn’t have to be stored at cold temperatures.
And, instead of using messenger RNA, it’s using a shell of another virus.
“What Johnson & Johnson is doing is taking another virus, something called an adenovirus, which is a common cold virus, and basically engineering it to express the coronavirus spike protein, and the spike protein is what your body forms antibodies to, what it forms T cells to,” Adalja said. “So it’s basically using one virus to deliver a piece of another virus.”
If all goes well with the clinical trial results, expected next week, it won’t be a long road on the path to emergency use authorization.
“They’re all going to basically operate in a generally similar fashion once the immune system sees them, it’s just how are you delivering that information to the immune system,” said Adalja.
AdventHealth here in Orlando was one of the sites for the phase 3 trial of Johnson and Johnson’s vaccine.
