FDA re­view­ers en­dorse J&J sin­gle-dose shot, lay­ing path for 3rd US vac­cine

J&J’s sin­gle-dose vac­cine may not have pro­duced quite the stel­lar num­bers of the mR­NA shots, but it still won a ring­ing en­dorse­ment from FDA re­view­ers, who ar­gued in brief­ing doc­u­ments that it could pro­vide ro­bust pro­tec­tion against the still-rag­ing virus.

The FDA con­firmed that across just un­der 40,000 vol­un­teers, the vac­cine proved 66% ef­fec­tive at pre­vent­ing symp­to­matic Covid-19, in­clud­ing 72% ef­fec­tive in the Unit­ed States. Al­though that’s short of the 95% fig­ures put up by Mod­er­na and Pfiz­er-BioN­Tech, the shot was still 85% ef­fec­tive at stop­ping se­vere dis­ease 28 days af­ter ad­min­is­tra­tion. There were sev­en deaths in the place­bo group — ze­ro in the vac­cine group.

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