The United States on Saturday granted authorization to Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine against covid-19 for emergency use in people 18 years of age and older, the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced.
This single-dose vaccine is the third – along with those from Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna – to be used to combat the virus with a massive immunization campaign in the United States, the country hardest hit by the pandemic, with more than 500,000 dead.
The new vaccine is very effective in preventing severe cases of COVID-19, even against new variants, the FDA said before giving it the green light.
“The authorization of this vaccine expands the availability of vaccines, the best medical prevention method for covid-19, to help us in the fight against this pandemic, which has claimed more than half a million lives in the United States,” said the Acting Director of the US Regulator, Janet Woodcock.
In large clinical trials, the efficacy of the J&J vaccine against serious diseases was 85.9% in the United States, 81.7% in South Africa, and 87.6% in Brazil.
The approval of the authorities comes after a group of independent experts recommended the approval and distribution of the vaccine from the US company on Friday, after studying in detail the data of clinical trials in more than 43,000 people.
100 million doses
At least three million doses of the ‘J&J’ immunizer are ready for distribution next week, according to the US government.
The vaccine can be stored at normal refrigerator temperatures, rather than in freezers, making logistics easier. Johnson & Johnson has committed to shipping 100 million doses to the United States by the end of June.
With 600 million doses ordered in total from Pfizer and Moderna, the US power will have enough vaccines by the end of July to immunize almost the entire population. But the addition of Johnson & Johnson could further accelerate the immunization campaign. In total, more than 72 million inoculations have already been carried out in the country.
The newly licensed immunizer, which has already started to be applied in South Africa, is a ‘viral vector’ vaccine. It uses another low virulence virus as a carrier, transformed to add genetic instructions from the virus responsible for covid-19. Once in cells, a typical SARS-CoV-2 protein is produced, educating the immune system to recognize it.
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source https://pledgetimes.com/us-approves-emergency-use-of-johnson-johnson-vaccine/
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