New Stories on Johnson & Johnson vaccine bury the lede — and the lede is GREAT news!
Great news today! The Johnson & Johnson 1 dose vaccine is getting approved! This is wonderful as it has the potential to speed up the ability to get people vaccines.
Not only is this great because it is another vaccine to add to the pool, but this one needs only one dose and is not as temperature dependent!
WaPo has a great story on this but unfortunately buries the lede. The headline is:
They go on to say
The review, although positive, was more nuanced than regulators’ assessments of the first two coronavirus vaccines, reflecting a pandemic that has entered a more complicated phase as variants capable of slipping by some aspects of immunity have emerged. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was more than 85 percent effective at preventing severe illness, including in a region dominated by a concerning variant, but only 66 percent protective overall when moderate cases were included.
This makes it sound like the vaccine isn’t that great.
CNN similarly leads with numbers that don’t sound great
The efficacy of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine against moderate to severe/critical Covid-19 across all geographic areas was 66.9% at least 14 days after the single dose vaccination and 66.1% at least 28 days after vaccination, a new analysis meant to brief the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee said
It isn’t until you get further into the WaPo article that you read:
“We know this vaccine prevents 85 percent of the severe disease. . . . It was 100 percent effective in preventing hospitalization and deaths, and that’s really what’s important,” said Nancy M. Bennett, a professor of medicine and public health sciences at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry.
100% effective in preventing hospitalizations and death. 100%. This shot not only makes you 85% less likely to get seriously ill (where you feel sick for weeks, like a really awful flu) but it eliminated hospitalizations and death completely in trials. It turns this into an inconvenience, basically. Something we can live with and continue our normal lives. Amazing.
So get vaccinated as soon as you can. Continue to wear masks and distance (either with or without the vaccine) for the time being. But allow yourself to feel HOPEFUL about this.
We got great news today!
A New Strain of the Flu May Have Exacerbated Last Year’s Flu Season, Researchers Say By Jan Wesner Childs
https://weather.com/health/cold-flu/news/2021-02-05-new-flu-strain-more-easily-transmissible
At a Glance
- The new strain is believed to be more easily transmissible.
- Researchers say fewer people, especially kids, had immunity to it.
- Last year saw one of the highest numbers of pediatric flu deaths on record.
A new, more transmissible strain of the flu may have circulated in the U.S. last year, according to new research from the University of Georgia.
Researchers said the new flu strain was a variant of the less common Type B influenza virus and followed a flu season in 2018-2019 that was mostly impacted by the more common Type A flu virus. The combination of the two meant that not only was the strain possibly more transmissible, but it also encountered a population with little existing immunity to it.
The study also says that could be why the 2019-2020 flu season started off unusually early, affected children in higher numbers than normal, and was more impacted by by a Type B influenza virus instead of one of the more common Type A viruses.
“We arrived at the explanation that it really was increased transmissibility of this novel variant, and at the same time the fact that the susceptible population, the population of individuals naïve to this virus, was larger than you would expect, which led to the dynamics that we see,” Pejman Rohani, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Georgia and the paper’s senior author, said in a news release.
The study was recently published in the journal PNAS.
(MORE: A Slow Flu Season Could Spell Trouble for Next Flu Season)
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that between 39 million and 56 million people were sickened by influenza and as many as 62,000 died from flu complications between October 1, 2019 and April 4, 2020.Advertisement
It was one of the worst flu seasons on record for kids, with at least 188 pediatric flu deaths.
“In the paper, we mention younger individuals were more severely affected [in 2019-2020] and that’s likely related to them having less time to be infected by other B viruses,” Rebecca Borchering, another author of the paper and also a scientist at the University of Georgia, said.
Influenza B reigned as a more prevalent flu virus at the start of the season in October 2019, which was unusual. It was followed by increasing cases of the typically more common influenza A. Health experts warned that some people could be infected by each strain, creating a “double-barrel” flu season.
“Influenza B viruses until now have been thought of as the junior partner in this endeavor, and what our paper demonstrates is that, in the 2019-2020 flu season, they were in fact the senior partner in the U.S. flu epidemic,” Rohani said.
Rohani and Borchering said the study points to a need for further flu surveillance outside of the traditional season and for hospitals to prepare for cases that may occur earlier than usual. They also said the research has implications for future vaccine development and transmission.
“Our study suggests it’s important to keep an eye on the evolution of influenza B to avoid a vaccine mismatch in the same way they do with H3N2,” Rohani said. “Anticipating the timing of influenza A and influenza B epidemics could improve vaccination schedules so that individuals have protection throughout the influenza season.”
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