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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

According to c|net, FDA panel gives Johnson & Johnson's one-shot COVID-19 vaccine green light [cnet.com]:

An advisory panel for the US Food and Drug Administration has recommended Johnson & Johnson's single-dose COVID-19 [cnet.com] vaccine be given the green light by the FDA. The FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products [fda.gov] Advisory Committee unanimously voted Friday afternoon to approve the vaccine [youtube.com].

The next step will be emergency approval from the FDA itself.

[...] In early February, a week after announcing that its single-dose vaccine [cnet.com] was 66% effective overall in preventing [jnj.com] COVID-19 in a global clinical trial, Johnson & Johnson submitted an application requesting the FDA grant emergency use authorization for the vaccine [cnet.com].

It would be the third vaccine on the US market, following the FDA granting emergency use authorization for the Pfizer [cnet.com] and Moderna [cnet.com] coronavirus vaccines in December, with vaccinations beginning just days later. Those vaccines are said to be 95% and 94% effective, respectively. Unlike the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, Johnson & Johnson's vaccine requires only a single shot [cnet.com].

Earlier this month, President Joe Biden announced that the US is buying enough doses of Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines to cover 300 million people [cnet.com] in the country by the end of July -- though this doesn't mean everyone will be vaccinated by then.

"We've now purchased enough vaccine supply to vaccinate all Americans," Biden said [twitter.com]. Actually administering the vaccines to all Americans could take longer [cnet.com] because vaccinations are managed at a state and local level.

Here's where to get a COVID-19 shot [cnet.com], and here's how to track how many vaccines are available [cnet.com] in your state.

MIT's Technology Review adds The one-shot vaccine from Johnson & Johnson now has FDA support in the US [technologyreview.com]:

The new one-shot vaccine, called Ad26.COV2.S, was developed by Johnson & Johnson using work from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. It employs a harmless viral carrier, adenovirus 26, which can enter cells but doesn’t multiply or grow. Instead, the carrier is used to drop off gene instructions that tell a person’s cells to make the distinctive coronavirus spike protein, which in turn trains the immune system to combat the pathogen.

The New York Times published a detailed graphical explanation [nytimes.com] of how the vaccine works.

Richard Nettles, vice president of US medical affairs at Janssen, a J&J subsidiary, told Congress during testimony [house.gov] on February 23 that production of the vaccine is “highly complex” and said the company was working to manufacture the shots at eight locations, including a US site in Maryland.

The manufacturing is complicated because the vaccine virus is grown in living cells before it is purified and bottled. Making a batch of virus takes two months, which is why there is no way to immediately increase supplies if timelines are missed.

[...] In late January [jnj.com], the company announced results from a 45,000-person study it carried out in the US, South Africa, and South America, in which people got either the vaccine or a placebo.

Overall, the vaccine was 66% effective in stopping covid-19, and somewhat better at stopping severe disease. In the trial, for instance, seven people died of covid-19, but all of these were in the placebo arm. Also, its effects increased with time—after a month, no one in the vaccine arm had to go to the hospital for covid-19.

[...] The J&J shot has fewer side effects than the mRNA vaccines and has also proved effective against a highly transmissible South African variant [technologyreview.com] of the virus that has accumulated numerous mutations.

The South Africa variant has alarmed researchers because it clearly decreases the effectiveness of some vaccines. A study in South Africa by AstraZeneca found its vaccine didn’t offer protection against the variant at all, causing officials to scrap a plan to distribute the shot there.

Original Submission