Covid-19 vaccines: Modern vs. Pfizer vs. Johnson & Johnson – important things to know (video)

Syracuse, NY – A year ago, American researchers injected the first experimental coronavirus vaccine into a volunteer’s arm, just when the pandemic was starting to spread in the United States.

Now, more than 2 million people across the country are being vaccinated against Covid-19 every day.

We asked Dr. Stephen Thomas, head of Infectious Diseases at SUNY Upstate Medical University, what we need to know about vaccines now and what we could learn in the coming months.

Watch the video above for a more detailed explanation of the three vaccines currently available in the United States – Moderna, Pfizer / BioNTech and Johnson & Johnson. Moderna and Pfizer are messenger RNA or mRNA vaccines and Johnson & Johnson is a viral vector vaccine. All three are designed to protect against Covid-19.

According to the CDC, instead of injecting the body with a weakened version of the coronavirus, these vaccines teach the body to produce a protein that triggers an immune response. It is the antibodies that our body produces that help us to stay safe when faced with the real virus.

Side effects

The mRNA vaccines have been administered to more than 80 million people in the United States and are safe and effective, said Thomas. Thomas was the principal investigator for the worldwide Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine trial.

In the trial data, Thomas noted: “The safety profile of these vaccines is very similar. Most people will feel some pain at the place where the vaccine was injected, and most people say the pain is mild to moderate. “

Dr. Thomas also mentioned these other common side effects:

• Mild to moderate headache

• Mild to moderate fatigue

• 30 to 40 percent of people may experience muscle pain or joint pain

• About 10 to 15 percent of people can develop fever

“The good news is that if this is going to happen to you, because it doesn’t happen to everyone, it happens right after you get vaccinated,” said Thomas. Usually, the side effects disappear in a few days, he added.

“With Pfizer and Moderna launching more than 80 million doses of vaccine, the side effects remain the same as the test data, and we are not seeing any new side effects or more serious side effects,” said Thomas.

What about variants?

The work is being done in laboratories with the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, testing people’s antibodies to see if the antibodies neutralize the variants.

Thomas said they are not as good at neutralizing these variants as they are against the predominant strain in the United States, which is China. But the experiments continue.

“There is some worrying data, so it is important that we vaccinate as many people as possible, because it is a race against the variants,” he said.

Thomas noted that the vaccines still work 50 to 60 percent as effective against the new variants.

“Just to put it in context, the annual flu vaccine is about 45 percent effective,” he said.

How important is the two-dose vaccine schedule?

Thomas said it is important to get these vaccines as close to the schedule as possible, as they were tested in the tests. If the change is unavoidable, Thomas recommends postponing the second dose instead of anticipating it.

When can children be vaccinated?

Pfizer’s tests started with children aged 18 to 85 and are now ending with children aged 12 to 15.

Moderna began testing its COVID-19 vaccine on babies and young children, with plans to recruit 6,800 children in the United States and Canada between the ages of 6 months and 11 years. It is a two-phase clinical trial dubbed the KidCOVE study.

“I predict that we will see a lot of data in 2021 that will look at other populations,” said Thomas.

What is collective immunity and when will we have it?

Herd immunity is achieved when a sufficient number of the population becomes immune to a disease (usually through vaccinations), making it difficult for the disease to spread.

This would mean that even those who are not immune would be protected.

“At the moment, about 15% of the country has received at least one dose of the vaccine, but that is a far cry from the 70 to 80% that we will need to obtain collective immunity,” said Thomas.

Thomas does not think it will be a question of vaccine supply, but more of a willingness for people to be vaccinated. “We are vaccinating 2 million people a day, if that were for 3 million, and we have 320 million people in the country, we could get herd immunity at the end of the summer.”

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