America Authorizes Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 Vaccine For Emergency Use (bbc.com) 118
America's Food and Drug Administration just authorized Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use, according to CBS News. "The vaccine is the third to be approved for use in the United States, and the first that requires only one shot..."
Among people who got the vaccine in clinical trials, there were no COVID-related deaths. Phase 3 clinical trials also showed protection against multiple emerging virus variants, including a more contagious strain that was first discovered in South Africa and has since been detected in the U.S.
The vaccine can be stored at standard refrigerator temperatures for up to three months.
More from the BBC: The company has agreed to provide the U.S. with 100 million doses by the end of June. The first doses could be available to the US public as early as next week. The U.K., EU and Canada have also ordered doses, and 500 million doses have also been ordered through the Covax scheme to supply poorer nations.
The vaccine can be stored at standard refrigerator temperatures for up to three months.
More from the BBC: The company has agreed to provide the U.S. with 100 million doses by the end of June. The first doses could be available to the US public as early as next week. The U.K., EU and Canada have also ordered doses, and 500 million doses have also been ordered through the Covax scheme to supply poorer nations.
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Re:Inneffective (Score:4, Informative)
All true, but I still want a mRNA vaccine so as to not reduce the efficacy of whatever Adenovirus vector J&J is using (26, IIRC... which is one of the most common.) You are likely to develop resistance to the vector, and then it won't work for you later if for some reason a vaccine can't be mRNA-based.
Re:Inneffective (Score:5, Interesting)
This.
In fact, that may be why the J&J vaccine effectiveness is so low in Africa, rather than because of the strain differences. The probability of having been exposed to that chimpanzee adenovirus vector or a close cousin thereof is probably almost zero in countries that have triple-digit chimpanzees in zoos, but decidedly nonzero in parts of the world where chimpanzees roam freely and the virus has the opportunity to jump species.
(Yes, I realize that chimpanzees are in central Africa, not South Africa, but Africa's borders are pretty porous, and other non-human primate species that could potentially be susceptible to that virus or a similar virus *do* live in South Africa, and the extent to which this virus can jump species is not known, but it has been documented to occur [nature.com] in some adenovirus strains.)
Isn't that less likely? (Score:1)
then it won't work for you later if for some reason a vaccine can't be mRNA-based.
Isn't the benefit of mRNA the flexibility to be able to make many more vaccines? Already hearing early news about AIDS and Malaria mRNA vaccines...
Personally I would prefer the convenience of a single shot J&J shot over the other mRNA variants. But I'll go with whatever I can get, if I need to take one before international travel (which seems extremely likely).
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It's hard to imagine a scenario where an lipid delivered mRNA vaccine wouldn't work, but an adenovirus delivered one would. If you did encounter such a thing, there are rather a lot of adenoviruses to work with.
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Maybe you replied to the wrong post? It's hard to believe you actually read mine.
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> It's hard to imagine a scenario where an lipid delivered mRNA vaccine wouldn't work, but an adenovirus delivered one would.
But it's easy to imagine a situation where there is only an adenovirus vaccine available and not an mRNA vaccine
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Is it? I think adenovirus vaccines' days are numbered. The mRNA ones work too well and don't have issues with either natural or artificial previous exposures.
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Re:Inneffective (Score:4, Funny)
mRNA is a much newer technology than the J&J platform is built upon. I feel like having an alternative to the mRNA may sit well with some people that otherwise would not take the mRNA based products from Pfizer or Moderna.
All too many folks who read conspiracy sites have not made their reservations for Pfizer/Moderna because of fear of getting the Bill Gates nanochips. What they didn't realize is that in most states you have the option of Apple nanochips as an alternative. You have to specify the choice when you make your reservation, and if you choose Apple you may have to wait a little longer, but in my experience it's worth taking the trouble.
When people report bad reactions to the vaccine, what's really happening is that they are getting Windows updates which have to be applied immediately and which can fail to install. On the way home from my second Moderna dose last week, Siri spoke in my head to say that I had a system update ready to install. But because I had taken the Apple option, all I had to do was think back "Install later" and all was good.
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There's also the added bonus that since the Apple nanobots have rounded corners, they're less damaging to other cells in the bloodstream.
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Another advantage- one shot, not two (Score:5, Insightful)
Another advantage, it's only one shot, rather than a series of two. So, you immunize twice as many people with the same number of doses,
An effectivity of 85% is plenty to stop the exponential in transmission. Vaccinating 200 people at 85% effectivity is far better in stopps transmission far better than vaccinating 100 people at 95% effectivity (which is the proper calculation: 200 doses will vaccinate 200 people if it's J&J, but only 100 people if it's Pfizer or Moderna). Other things equal, for the specific goal of stopping the epidemic, it's a matter of how fast to achieve herd immunity, and J&J would do it faster.
Also, with one shot, rather than two, you avoid the difficulty of rescheduling a second shot, and you get immunity of people who for one reason or another fail to get the second shot.
(The immunization takes hold faster as well.)
You also can't rule out the superior logistics of only needing refrigerator temperatures when it comes to providing a vaccine in places like Africa which a negative -90 freezer for the mRNA isn't going to exist.
True. Not just in the third world, though: by not requiring as rigid refrigeration, the supply chain is much simpler; you can get more vaccine out faster to where it's needed.
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According to the local infectious disease expert on the news this morning, since the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were tested earlier than the J&J vaccine, with som
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Fair point.
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It's going to be the work horse for the US vaccine program. Reason is that it's a cheap and convenient single shot vaccine with much less side-effects than the mRNA ones.
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Re:Inneffective (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed.
"Even at 66 percent overall efficacy, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is considered a successful vaccine. The average flu vaccine usually hovers around 50 percent efficacy, Amiji says. Plus, 66 percent efficacy refers only to the overall results of the clinical trial. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was 85 percent effective at preventing severe cases of COVID-19, and there were no deaths or hospitalizations among the group who received the vaccine in the clinical trials"
https://news.northeastern.edu/... [northeastern.edu]
Re:Inneffective (Score:5, Insightful)
This vaccine is not nearly as effective as the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA vaccines.
That isn't clear. The J&J vaccine was tested in Brazil and South Africa, where more infectious strains are more common.
Worldwide, testing found the J&J vaccine to be 66% effective, compared to 95% for the mRNA vaccines. But for testing done in the US, the results were closer.
I'll take whatever vaccine I can get.
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Re:Inneffective (Score:4, Insightful)
That suggests a citation being needed. I can't find articles saying that the mRNA ones are not effective against the new strains. I can find plenty of articles saying the opposite, that they are still effective, but can't find claims that they don't work.
Re:Ineffective - about 10% (Score:1)
Re:Ineffective - about 10% (Score:4, Informative)
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False. In a lab the tests show the only a 2/3rds reduction in efficacy, and the scientists also point out the caveat that so far all studies on the B.1.1.7 and B.1.351 variants have only occured in the lab and thus are likely under-reporting the actual efficacy due to not including the resulting body's T-cell response. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/... [nejm.org]
The reality is the current mRNA viruses are expected by epidemiologists to be sufficiently strong against new variants to get the pandemic completely under co
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Nice work. We've established you don't have attention span to even read to the end of the sentence.
Either that or you're clueless about vaccines work, especially considering the vaccines for Measles and TB have 0% efficacy in the same scenario that I just quoted.
Actually. I'm not going to rule out that you're both clueless and have a short attention span. Though I apologize for the link I sent you, it's quite clear you won't be able to understand it with your limited knowledge.
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That's not what that 2/3 figure means. In fact, if I'm reading the abstract correctly, it's a very weird number.
What they did is a pretty standard antibody activity test. You take serum containing antibodies (in this case from volunteers in the vaccine trials), mix it with virus in known concentration, and look for a reaction. If you see one, you dilute the serum by a factor (usually 2, as in this case) and try again. Repeat. The number of dilutions until you don't see a reaction anymore is the "titre." Not
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Yes. Though I'm not sure why you think that's relevant. Do you think asbestos which is present in natural mineral talc somehow snuck its way into your vaccine as well?
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Yes. Though I'm not sure why you think that's relevant. Do you think asbestos which is present in natural mineral talc somehow snuck its way into your vaccine as well?
Nah, everyone knows that the Microchip doesn't work if it's around asbestos. Asbestos is known to degrade 5G signals.
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I'm sure you use Nestle products. You know they killed a lot of babies by convincing women to use baby formula instead of breast milk, in countries where the water supply was unsafe, yes?
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Re:Inneffective (Score:5, Interesting)
Worldwide, testing found the J&J vaccine to be 66% effective, compared to 95% for the mRNA vaccines. But for testing done in the US, the results were closer.
To be more specific, those efficacy numbers represent preventing a negative follow-up test if symptoms warrant. So after getting vaccinated, if a person gets sick enough to warrant a COVID test, and it tests positive, that is considered a failure of the vaccine. It isn't clear how many people still contract (and thus can spread) COVID after getting the various vaccines, because they do not do follow up tests by course, but only based on symptoms.
The more important stats, IMO, are how many hospitalizations and deaths occur after being vaccinated. It appears that all of these vaccines are significantly reducing both those numbers. If 100% of the population still gets COVID, yet no one gets sick enough to even require hospitalization, then the vaccination was a complete success in its primary goal. As stated in the summary, not a single person died after taking this vaccine (meaning that for those that still contracted COVID, it was not bad enough to kill some people that otherwise would have died).
I think that COVID may have revealed some interesting viral / immune system behaviors that were unknown previously. I think there is a good chance that with many other viruses (especially of the coronavirus family), we've had asymptomatic infections far more than realized. Especially within the public we have this all-or-nothing mentality about sickness, where a person is very sick with the flu, and someone else in the household has just a runny nose or no symptoms at all, and thus they didn't also have the flu. The tremendous amount of studies done on COVID has shown extremely surprising results, such as 100% asymptomatic individuals with a higher viral load and shedding than people with bad symptoms. Interesting, if not a little scary.
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CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/vaccin... [cdc.gov]
So, with respect to efficacy, the J&J vaccine is still more effective against COVID in a worst case scenario than the flu vaccines are against the flu in the best case scenario. And that's with a single shot and much easier logistics. Don't get hung up on the Moderna/Pfizer numbers.
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Cases per capita (Score:2)
USA also has a larger population than any other country that isn't China or Ind(ones)?ia. USA is still behind Montenegro, Czechia, and Slovenia in cases per capita, though I admit that's not saying much.
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The smaller the country the more noise you have in a whatever per capita ratio because for small countries even one single case makes a difference.
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What steps did the United States neglect to take given that the goal was to keep its total number of cases below San Marino's?
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Re:Inneffective (Score:5, Insightful)
It is about as effective as the measles vaccine, and when was the last time you heard about anyone in the U.S. or Europe getting measles, except among children of the anti-vax movement?
The J&J vaccine is in fact very effective by any epidemiological standard. If we could somehow give everyone the J&J shot tomorrow, COVID-19 would be essentially eradicated in less than a month.
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It is about as effective as the measles vaccine, and when was the last time you heard about anyone in the U.S. or Europe getting measles, except among children of the anti-vax movement?
Why do you think that? Last time I checked, the measles vaccine was 97% effective.
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Pretty much all the vaccines are almost 100% effective at keeping you from getting a "put me in the hospital or kills me" case of it.
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Kindly note the "America" shouldn't be used to refer to the U.S.
I have heard this said for many years, but it's not true. I have traveled all over the world, from Dubai to Zimbabwe. No matter where I go, if I say "I'm American", literally no one I have ever met anywhere in the world in my life has mistaken me for being Brazilian.
No matter where you are in the world, everyone knows "American" is short hand for "Citizen of the United States of America".
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Thats because for the most part non US americans generally really want you to know they aint from the US. "Im from Canada dude!" gets you in a lot less trouble in most places. (And for reference most us cant tell the difference between the accents, so, if your abroud and someone looks like they want to take your head off just lie and say "Woah man, Im canadian", and it'll work every time .
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Except for the times it doesn't. Terrorism is funny that way.
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"Hold y'er horses. All ya'll know I ain't no American. Why I'll let all ya'll know good and well that I am a proud United Kingdom-er."
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"As an American officer living in Germany, I'm surprised by how closely Germans follow U.S. politics, and I often end up listening to polemics on the follies of American foreign policy. These run the gamut from American responsibili
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Where in history has anyone outside the US refereed to themselves as 'American'?
I was in Japan about a decade ago and some school kids came up to me to practice English. When they asked where I was from and I replied "United States" I got puzzled looks. My wife then said "America" and then it clicked for them.
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Maybe not outside, but inside the USA "Buy American" included all members of NAFTA, at least with some "Buy American" regulations that I have dealt with.
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I stayed in a B&B in Ireland once. The host lady said "oh, you're American!" and I replied "well, Canadian actually." She responded "oh, same thing, right?"
I replied "sure, just like you're English."
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https://www.reddit.com/r/memes... [reddit.com]
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And yet, exactly zero of them call themselves "Americans/Americanos/Américains/Amerikanen."
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And yet, exactly zero of them call themselves "Americans/Americanos/Américains/Amerikanen."
Side foray. I was listening to a NPR interview, a woman reporter was interviewing a lady from France that happened to be of African descent.
At one point in the conversation, the reporter asked her "As an African-American, how do you feel about" (something something)
Awkward pause ensues. Then the lady replied "Oh, I'm not African American - I'm French."
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There is no continent called America.
There's more than one model for which land masses are continents and there's nothing wrong with the ones that count America as a single continent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Personally I use 'American' as a demonym for the USA but I wouldn't confuse that with thinking there's some objectively 'right' model of the continents - there isn't.
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There's more than one model for which land masses are continents and there's nothing wrong with the ones that count America as a single continent.
I know. When I wrote that there's no continent called America, I was including that with "in most standard forms of English..." (even though it's arguably not about language). The naming of continents is done differently in different places and has also changed over time. But most English-speaking countries currently don't count America as one continent. It's arbitrary but it is a convention, and that strongly influences how the language is used.
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There are 650+ millions of Americans that live in countries different than the US.
Kindly note that "US" and "U.S." shouldn't be used to refer to the U.S.A. I mean, we're being pedant, right?
People refer to the United States of America as U.S., U.S.A., US, USA, or simply "America". There are continents called North America and South America but no location known as America. As such, the people of the world refer to the United States of America simply as America. You may not like these facts but this is the truth.
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Note: Mexicans tend to strongly consider themselves Americans (but not USians, except perhaps the ones who are hoping for the reconquest of Texas and California).
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Note: Mexicans tend to strongly consider themselves Americans
That's an interesting factoid I didn't know... but do they consider Mexico to be part of "America"? I ask because it's the use of "America" not "American" that has come into question.
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America was the name (after Amerigo Vespucci) for the land across the Atlantic. Europeans often still use the term in that sense, analogous to "Eurasia." The division into North and South America is a bit arbitrary (as is the division of Eurasia into Europe and Asia) and is fairly recent historically.
IIRC:
In colonial Mexico "norteamerica" (North America) was the northern Mexican frontier area that is roughly the SW United States today, from Texas to California. Most of the population was in the south, and t
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but do they consider Mexico to be part of "America"?
Yes
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I find that difficult to believe but that is quite interesting.
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Here's an article about it, which you could have found by searching [theatlantic.com]. Relevant quotes:
an assistant professor in the Spanish department and native of Venezuela, to recount this anecdote. "When I arrived to the U.S. and people talked about 'America,' I thought they were referring to the continent. I was surprised that America, in fact, referred to the U.S.A."
my father, a first generation Mexican immigrant and U.S. citizen, informed me (I guess I had never noticed) he has always replied "the U.S." when asked where he is from, because for Latin Americans, saying one is "American" is a vague identifier.
A lot of central-Americans also consider central America to be a separate continent, although no one else does.
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That's funny and something to keep in mind.
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Name one other country with "America" in the name.
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Name one other country with "America" in the name.
I confess, I could only be bothered to find the one, but there may be more:
North Macedonia
(the letters are in a different order though)
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LOL ok you got me with that one
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There are 650+ millions of Americans
No there's not, unless you think literally half of the citizens of the USA (the only group who refer to themselves as "American") live abroad.
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Mexicans also consider themselves Americans, FYI.
I'd Like To Share My Opinion On This Topic (Score:1, Funny)
But Twitter hasn't told me what it is yet.
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Did you ask Facebook?
requires only one shot (Score:2)
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It's even a category on PornHub.
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Two Johnsons one hole.
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Sorry to bring it to you, but this one was developed in Belgium at Janssen Pharmaceutics. Which is a daughter firm of Jhonson & Jhonson.
Similar I guess to how BioNTech is a German daughter firm of Pfizer.
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Eminem approves (Score:1)
much higher chance of getting sick (Score:1)
If the Pfizer/BionTech vaccine is 95% effective, and the J&J vaccine is 75% effective, then your chances of getting sick after the J&J vaccine are 5 times that of the P/B vaccine, or put in journalist terms, 500% higher.
Fortuntely we already have a plan right..... (Score:2)
So is that now? (Score:1)