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Johnson & Johnson announced today (January 29) that its one-shot vaccine is 66 percent effective at preventing moderate and severe COVID-19 and 85 percent protective against severe disease.
“This is a really great result,” Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist at Yale University, tells The New York Times. “I hope this vaccine gets approved as soon as possible to reduce disease burden around the world.”
No one who received the shot died of COVID-19, while five individuals in the placebo group did, Reuters reports. “The key is not only overall efficacy but specifically efficacy against severe disease, hospitalization, and death,” Walid Gellad, a physician who studies health policy at the University of Pittsburgh, tells Reuters.
Although the company’s vaccine is less effective at preventing COVID-19 than Moderna’s and Pfizer’s versions are, it still surpasses the US Food and Drug Administration’s 50 percent efficacy requirement for emergency use approval. Unlike ...
