A Third Covid-19 Vaccine to Help Save Lives
The FDA authorized the highly effective, single-dose vaccine from Janssen/Johnson & Johnson for emergency use
Hope is on the horizon. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the Janssen Covid-19 Vaccine under emergency use authorization (EUA) on February 27. With 28.4 million confirmed U.S. cases and 508,300 fatalities, we need all the help we can get. We now have three approved vaccines for the prevention of SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing the Covid-19 pandemic.
Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies is the vaccine arm of Johnson & Johnson. The Janssen vaccine is now approved for use in people 18 years and older. It only requires a single dose to be effective and is not burdened by the cold storage requirements, which slowed the distribution of the two previously approved vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer. This vaccine can be mass-produced and widely distributed to help get more shots in more arms as fast as possible.
Like the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, the Jansen vaccine does not contain a live virus. One cannot catch Covid-19 from these vaccines.
In the past few months, we have heard a lot about how the Pfizer and Moderna Covid-19 vaccines use messenger RNA (mRNA) to invoke immunity. A single strand of mRNA…