USA: Recommend booster doses of J&J 3:21 vaccine
(CNN) -
Data from a real-world study evaluating Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine found it to be 73.6% effective, according to research published Tuesday in the JAMA Network Open.
The study evaluated patients within the Mayo Clinic Health System between February and July of this year.
The researchers followed nearly 9,000 patients vaccinated with the J&J vaccine and nearly 89,000 patients who were not vaccinated.
They looked specifically to see how many of them tested positive for COVID-19.
Among the 8,889 vaccinated patients, 60 had a positive PCR test.
Among the 88,898 unvaccinated patients, 2,236 had a positive PCR test.
The researchers concluded that the vaccine was 73.6% effective and led to a 3.73-fold reduction in coronavirus infections.
The finding is similar to data from clinical trials that found the vaccine was 66.9% effective against moderate to severe COVID-19.
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The new research showed a reduction in severe cases, especially hospitalizations, but too few people contracted COVID-19 among the vaccinated group to draw a solid conclusion about how well the vaccine prevented deaths.
In an accompanying comment, Dr. Mohammad Sajadi of the Institute for Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine argued that the findings are part of a growing body of work that suggests "room for improvement" with the J&J vaccine.
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"What's becoming clearer over time is that the [Johnson & Johnson covid-19] single-dose vaccine regimen appears to be inferior to mRNA vaccines in terms of [vaccine effectiveness]" Sajadi wrote, comparing the J&J vaccine to a different type of COVID-19 vaccine made by Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna.
Sajadi noted that the same group of researchers who conducted this latest J&J study had previously analyzed the effectiveness of the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines, which are "significantly higher".
Sajadi said the J&J vaccine upgrade may ultimately come in the form of a second dose, or potentially by giving recipients a booster of a Covid-19 mRNA vaccine.
Coronavirus Vaccine