The nation has a third weapon to wield against the coronavirus, and this onedoesn’t need to be kept frozen or followed by a booster shot.
Those attributes of Johnson & Johnson’s coronavirus vaccine, which gained regulatory clearance on Saturday, promise to help state and local officials quell the pandemic punishing their communities. First, however, they will need to determine its place in an expanding anti-virus arsenal, where it joins vaccines with sky-high efficacy rates that are still in short supply.
Decisions to send the shots to harder-to-reach communities make practical sense, because Johnson & Johnson’s single-shot vaccine is easier to store and use. But they could drive perceptions of a two-tiered vaccine system, riven along racial or class lines — with marginalized communities getting what they think is an inferior product.
There is so much mistrust already in these underserved communities that this is completely understandable because of the terrible messaging about “effectiveness” which is misleading. All the vaccines are 100% effective against hospitalizations and death, including the Johnson and Johnson one shot. The only difference is that you are very slightly more likely to get a very mild, non-threatening case with the J&J, which isn’t even worth mentioning when we are trying to vaccinate high risk populations that have been in danger of dying in massive numbers for the past year. Why the public health officials and media chose to talk about this in terms of “efficacy” this way I will never understand. It’s confusing to everyone and especially people who are already justifiably leery of being short-changed when it comes to health care.
I will happily — gratefully — take the J&J vaccine. If it would help, I’d volunteer to do it. But I live in a place where it’s easy to store the others at the subzero temperatures necessary and the J&J is so much more practical to be used in places where that’s not available. But if it’s what they have on offer when my name is called I’ll be thrilled to have it. I hope they can find a way to reassure everyone that any shot they are offered will save them.