Johnson & Johnson’s COVID vaccine is effective, say California leaders

One by one on 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, arms out, while a worker rubbed his skin and injected Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine – all in front of a row of more than a dozen TV cameras, plus more photographers and reporters. .

It was an effort to show that state leaders are putting their money where it is when they proclaim the effectiveness and importance of the newly approved single injection vaccine.

“I want all Californians to have the utmost confidence that this vaccine and all three vaccines that have been approved are safe and effective,” said California surgeon general Nadine Burke Harris after receiving her injection, noting that her mother had also received a Johnson & Johnson dosed a few days earlier. “My colleagues and I reviewed the data. We saw science and research. This vaccine is so good – it is good enough for my mom, it is good enough for me. “

Johnson & Johnson’s “ready-to-use” vaccine, as epidemiologist Erica Pan called it after receiving its injection, has enormous potential to protect groups that have been hit hard by the coronavirus, but it can be difficult for public health officials to reach .

This is because the vaccine is stored in a common refrigerator, instead of the super-cold required by Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, facilitating distribution in community clinics or sending doses to rural areas. Its single-dose regimen also means that health authorities need to contact people only once, instead of scheduling a second appointment.

California has started receiving hundreds of thousands of doses from Johnson & Johnson and expects supply to increase substantially in the next month. Pediatrician and pastor Donna White Carey said her church in West Oakland plans to start running Johnson & Johnson dose vaccination clinics four days a week for the next four weeks, which could allow 5,000 people to be vaccinated.

To achieve this potential, however, the public must rely on scientists when they say that Johnson & Johnson’s injection works – and that all vaccines are safe and necessary.

“The faster we get to community immunity, the faster we will end this pandemic,” said Tomás Aragón, director of the California Department of Public Health. “We all want to hug our families and friends again. We all want to go back to school, we want to go back to sports ”.

Clinical trials of the Johnson & Johnson injection showed that it had slightly lower levels of effectiveness than the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. The researchers say that these studies cannot be compared face to face because they were conducted in different circumstances and at different times of the pandemic; they emphasized that the tests showed that Johnson & Johnson vaccines were highly effective in preventing serious illness and death from COVID.

But public health officials fear that people may pass on opportunities to give Johnson & Johnson an injection because they think it is not as effective and choose to wait for Pfizer or Moderna. Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan said last week that he declined thousands of shots from Johnson & Johnson because he believed they were not “the best”.

This label can be especially harmful in the Latinx and Negras communities, where COVID cases and deaths have been disproportionately high and where the state is working with community health groups to build trust in all three vaccines and emphasizing that Johnson & Johnson does not it is a second category taken.

Thursday’s event at the Colosseum, which involved a diverse group of state leaders who addressed the public in English and Spanish, showed that the authorities are taking this concern seriously.

“I am asked: ‘What is the best vaccine?’” Said Aragón. “The first one in your arm – this is the best vaccine.”