As concerns over the efficacy of Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot vaccine increase, top Bay Area public health officials have come together for what appears to be their definitive statement about the vaccine options currently available in the United States.
Public health officials from Santa Cruz, Berkeley and all nine counties in the Bay Area – Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma – issued a statement on Monday emphasizing the fact that all vaccine options are “safe and have been shown to be highly effective in preventing symptomatic diseases and hospitalization”.
“Clinical tests for all three vaccines have shown that they have been 100% effective in preventing deaths from COVID-19,” says the dispatch. “There is also growing evidence that all three vaccines also help to prevent asymptomatic diseases.”
The statement reflects that of prominent public health experts, many of whom emphasized that the newest vaccine to be authorized for emergency use in the United States is as valuable as its two vaccine brothers.
The statement acknowledges the general perception that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is less effective than its two-dose counterparts, in part exacerbated by officials like Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, who declined a distribution of Johnson & Johnson doses after suggesting they are inferior to the Moderna and Pfizer shots.
“What is not in dispute is that all three vaccines – Pfizer, Moderna and Johnson & Johnson – are extremely effective in preventing hospitalizations and deaths,” said Duggan in an article in the Detroit Free Press newspaper days after being criticized by these comments .
“There has been a lot of debate about the advantages of one brand of vaccine over another, but it is difficult to compare its effectiveness,” says the statement, adding that none of the vaccines were examined face to face to determine how well they work at the same time.
The commonly praised statistics for the effectiveness levels of each vaccine occurred in different contexts, with Johnson & Johnson having to deal with new variants of the virus.
“With COVID-19 continuing to circulate while we work for community immunity,” says the statement, “our collective medical advice is this: the best vaccine is one that you can get faster”.