March 13 – Thousands of doses of a new single-dose COVID-19 vaccine developed by pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson arrived in Alaska this week, and many of Alaska’s health leaders point to data showing that the new vaccine is safe and Alaska’s effective protection option against coronavirus.
“It’s another tool in the toolbox to help us fight COVID-19,” said Dr. Bob Onders, administrator at Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, on Friday.
“The fact that it can be stored and transported in a standard refrigerator, and that requires only one dose, gives Alaska more flexibility,” said Dr. Anne Zink, the state’s chief medical officer, in a statement.
The J&J vaccine is the third to receive an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration. The Alaska vaccine distribution in March included 8,900 doses from Johnson & Johnson, plus more than 100,000 first doses of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines shipped to the state this month.
Alaska this week became the first state to remove the vaccine’s eligibility requirements, opening consultations for anyone aged 16 and over who lives or works in the state – a change that was made possible in part due to the arrival of the extra vaccine in the state this week.
As of Friday, more than a quarter of Alaska’s inhabitants had received an injection of vaccine, making Alaska one of the most vaccinated states in the country.
As the new vaccine began to arrive this week, Alaskans are already being inoculated with the option of a single injection.
The J&J vaccine, like the other two vaccines available, “has proven effective in the things we really want to prevent: hospitalization and serious complications, including death from COVID-19,” said Onders. “What the CDC is recommending is that everyone gets the first vaccine available to them, and that is what we recommend, too.”
Onders on Friday disputed an article published this week by a Seattle public health doctor who expressed doubts about the clinical trial data, which he said suggested that the new vaccine may not work as well for Alaskan natives.
Onders said the article is worrying, misleading and has no data basis.
“The number of Alaskan Natives and American Indians in the study, and what the author of the article comments on, are too small to draw any conclusions about whether the vaccine is better for one group of people than another,” said Onders. . “It is unfortunate that there is under-representation of Alaskan Natives and American Indians in the data, but what we do know is that it generally works very well in all groups.”
In J&J clinical trials, although there were only a small number of Alaskan Natives and American Indians included, there were still reduced levels of serious virus complications and reduced rates of hospitalizations and deaths from the virus, Onders said.
“The other point is that he draws conclusions from the experience in Brazil, with indigenous populations in South America, and concludes that it may have an impact on the effectiveness for Native Alaskans and American Indians,” said Onders. “But we don’t know that. And I think that Brazil is a unique situation, where there are different variants in Brazil that can change the results ”in the data.
“It is worrying when people create unjustified hesitation in a situation where we know that the more people get vaccinated, the better it will be for us,” added Onders.
A joint refutation of the original article was recently published in Indian Country Today by a coalition of native health experts.
“Suggestions that a vaccine does not provide protection against COVID-19 for a given racial group have no plausible biological basis and are not supported by the available evidence,” said the second article.
Although the J&J vaccine has been found in clinical trials with slightly lower levels of effectiveness than the two mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna, the researchers said it is difficult to compare these studies because they were done during different points in the pandemic.
The flexibility that comes with the J&J vaccine “may make it easier to keep it in village clinics for longer periods, because they don’t have deep-frozen freezers, but they do have vaccine coolers,” said Onders.