J&J's vaccine results came a bit earlier than expected.
The most important thing to highlight is it was 85% efficacious on preventing severe disease after 28 days. At 49 days, there were no cases of severe disease among vaccinated. This was similar for all ages, even the elderly, and pretty importantly efficacy against severe disease was also fairly high against the South African variant.
Overall efficacy of 66% is lower than the mRNA vaccines on preventing moderate and severe disease, but not too surprising as J&J's earlier clinical trials didn't produce high neutralizing antibodies like the mRNA vaccines:
But this is still a big success. This vaccine is a single dose and just needs a basic refrigerator and greatly expands existing vaccine supply.
It may not prevent symptomatic disease as well as the other vaccines but it seems to be sufficient to prevent hospitalization and death. Though it would be nice to see the actual data. This will be a great stop gap for the developing world to avoid needless Covid deaths.
And like the other vaccines, efficacy seems to begin as soon as 14 days post vaccination.
They plan to file for a EUA early next month and will be able to send doses immediately after.
A brief timeline of other coronavirus stuff:
Novavax's US results are coming April/late March at the earliest. We got their UK and South Africa results today. It had good efficacy for the wild type and the UK variant. A large reduction in symptomatic efficacy against South African variant, but too early to tell how concerning that is for severe disease without more data.
AstraZeneca's US results should be coming in April/late March at the earliest.
HEROS tracking study on US families and transmission in children will likely have results in March.