Mercer Island MD: How new single-dose vaccine could help get us to herd immunity

There is a new vaccine coming out from Johnson & Johnson. How is it different from the others that preceded it? Mercer Island MD Dr. Gordon Cohen joined Seattle’s Morning News to discuss how it was tested against new COVID strains, and shown to be effective.

“So the Johnson & Johnson vaccine uses somewhat different technology,” Dr. Cohen explained. “One of the interesting things about it is that it only requires a single shot rather than multiple shots. Now, we have to keep in mind that the studies on these vaccines, or when they were ready to be studied, occurred at different time points in the history of the vaccine development.”

Is the vaccine effective against the new strain of COVID?

“The original Pfizer vaccine and Moderna vaccine were tested and were able to demonstrate about 95% effective. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was completed later and was tested later, and so that Johnson & Johnson vaccine had to face the new strains, the UK strain, the South African strain, and even now there’s other strains being described, … so there’s these mutations that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine had to deal with, and they’re showing efficacy,” he said. “… The good news is that it’s a more stable prep, and it’s only a single shot.”

As Dave noted, there have been reports of long lines and delays in distribution. Is there some reason that with a vaccine that doesn’t require extreme refrigeration, you couldn’t have it in every drugstore?

“I think they’re trying to get to that point, and right now the demand exceeds the supply, and it seems that the government is very focused on increasing the supply,” Cohen said. “… However, if you actually look at it critically, there’s actually a number of different studies and surveys that have been done that really suggests that the overall demand may not be really high enough, that we may only have about 60% of people, or 60 to 70% of people who are willing to actually get the vaccine.”

Mercer Island MD: Second dose of COVID vaccine may cause temporary ‘fluish symptoms’

He’s concerned that this resistance to the vaccine may make it difficult to achieve herd immunity, and that many people are resistant because of how fast the COVID vaccines were developed.

“Now if we look at, for example, the flu vaccine, we know that only about 40% of people get it every year. It has been speculated that if we get to 70%, we will have herd immunity. But the fact of the matter is, according to the CDC, we don’t actually know the number, so it could be lower than 70%, or theoretically, it could be higher,” he said. “So I’m concerned about: Are we going to get enough people vaccinated to actually be able to, you know, get past all of this?”

“There was an article published in Nature and Medicine back in October, and at that time they surveyed people in 19 different countries, and they found that only 71.5% of people would consider taking a COVID vaccine. … Part of the reason is because people still feel like this vaccine came out too fast. They don’t understand that there was actually a decade of research that preceded it, and it was built on a platform that has been developed over a long period of time.”

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on KIRO Radio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

Follow @http://twitter.com/Mynorthwest