Having two vaccines is good. But three is better — and it could make a major difference in getting the pandemic under control.
"It could be a total game changer," said Dr. Muriel Jean-Jacques, an assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University.
Millions of doses of the Covid-19 vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson will soon be available in the U.S., a much-anticipated development that could help turn the tide of the pandemic by vastly speeding the rate at which people are vaccinated.
Experts say the newly authorized vaccine could play a key role in staving off another surge of infections, particularly as the recent sharp declines in reported cases of Covid-19 appear to be leveling off and rising once again.
"We've never had to vaccinate our whole population at the same time before — not to mention the rest of the world — so having more vaccines will make that easier," Jean-Jacques said.
The single-dose vaccine, manufactured by a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary called Janssen Biotech, received emergency use authorization from the FDA on Saturday. The company shipped out 4 million doses Monday, with 16 million more doses expected by the end of the month.MARCH 2, 202110:27
The vaccine's authorization is a significant milestone, because it will help ease the supply and distribution bottlenecks that have hampered the rollout of vaccines across the country, said Dr. Stella Safo, an HIV primary care physician who is an assistant professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
"It's invaluable," she said. "The more options we have, the better. It's really a thing to celebrate."
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine does not require ultra-cold storage conditions, as the vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech do, and it can instead be kept in regular refrigerators. That could ease some distribution challenges, particularly in rural communities.
And the vaccine requires only a single dose, unlike the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, which require two shots three to four weeks apart.
A single-dose vaccine could help boost the country's rate of vaccination, and increasing the number of people vaccinated each week will be critical for containing new outbreaks, especially as more contagious variants of the coronavirus become more widespread.
An analysis by the Food and Drug Administration found that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was 85 percent effective at preventing severe Covid-19 and 100 percent effective at preventing death. In the U.S., the single dose was 72 percent effective at preventing moderate to severe disease.
Moderna's vaccine is 94 percent effective at preventing symptomatic Covid-19, and Pfizer's vaccine was found to be 95 percent effective. But experts said the three vaccines should not be compared based on those numbers alone, because they all provide strong protection against severe disease.
"All three of them are really quite good, and people should take the one that's most available to them," Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Center for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press."
The Johnson & Johnson clinical trials also took place later in the pandemic and in regions where worrisome variants of the coronavirus have emerged.
"We're not comparing the same thing, because the pandemic has changed," Safo said. "The reality of where we are now is very different compared to the summer, when those other vaccines were first evaluated."
Scientists have been particularly concerned about how well the current vaccines will protect against the variants that are circulating and new ones that may emerge.

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