This story in the Daily Beast discusses the new Johnson and Johnson vaccine and explains all the pros and cons, most of which you’ve probably already heard. All in all, it’s a welcome addition to the toolbox. However, it doesn’t seem to work very well against some of the variants and frankly, we don’t really know how well the other vaccines work against the current variants either. And the more this spreads the more new variants emerge.
The article concludes with this, which isn’t good news but gives us some idea of what we’re in for:
[T]he diminishing effectiveness of the current vaccines against new strains of the novel coronavirus should give us pause. It’s looking increasingly possible that SARS-CoV-2 could end up being a perennial problem, just like the fast-mutating flu virus.
Instead of vaccinating everyone once and then getting on with our lives, we’d need to bake annual vaccinations into our routines. You should get a flu shot every fall. Start getting comfortable with the idea of getting an annual COVID shot, too.
It would be up to industry to update the COVID vaccines at least annually—if not more frequently. That’s a straightforward process for makers of mRNA vaccines. But to keep rural clinics stocked with jabs, we need a novel coronavirus vaccine that’s both easy to update and easy to store.
It’s unclear yet whether the Johnson and Johnson jab is the one.
Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, raised the prospect of adding a “bivalence” feature to non-mRNA vaccines. “Bivalence would mean, you make a vaccine that is expressing the protein of both the standard viral type, as well as the mutation,” Fauci told The Daily Beast.
If that’s not possible with the Johnson and Johnson shot, it might work on some of the other vaccines that are in development. New non-mRNA vaccines from Novavax and AstraZeneca are also inching toward FDA approval in the United States.
Hopefully, this “Manhattan Project” pace of development is building the knowledge base that will make all this work. But it looks as though it’s not going to be get your shots and then everything will be fine. We’ll be dealing with this in some form for quite some time.
If I had any entrepreneurial scientific chops I’d be working on better PPE. I have a feeling that’s going to be part of our lives going forward.