Johnson & Johnson said its single-dose vaccine protects against breakthrough COVID-19 for up to six months.
No waning of protection was found for ICU admissions for all three vaccines, J&J said. The company said the study was carried out by collecting claims and laboratory data covering 168 million people.
“We continue to undertake extensive efforts to study the durability of protection offered by the Johnson & Johnson vaccine amidst the ever-changing COVID-19 pandemic,” said Mathai Mammen, J&J’s executive vice president of pharmaceuticals, in the news release.
Mammen added that “while these are rapidly evolving data, we are seeing vaccine effectiveness against COVID-19-related hospitalization of approximately 80 percent from a single shot of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and this level of protection holds steady across the length of time studied thus far—up to six months.”
Despite the study being completed before the spread of Omicron, Mammen argued that the J&J shot produces a strong enough COVID-19 antibody response that “is consistent across variants, including Omicron.”
About three weeks ago, federal drug regulators expanded their warning about a severe condition linked to the J&J vaccine—known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome. The regulators listed it as a medical-related issue for someone not to get the shot.
“We provide the first evidence of the effectiveness of a homologous Ad26.COV.2 vaccine boost given 6–9 months after the initial single vaccination series during a period of Omicron variant circulation,” authors wrote in the preprint study, which evaluated data sourced from South Africa.
