Coronavirus Global situation
Two doses of J&J's vaccine 'cut Omicron hospital stays'
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JOHANNESBURG • Two doses of Johnson & Johnson's (J&J) Covid-19 vaccine slashed hospitalisations caused by the Omicron variant in South Africa by up to 85 per cent, a critical finding as the J&J vaccine is being increasingly relied upon across Africa, researchers said.
The results are heartening as the rise of Omicron continues to push the world to a record number of daily cases, and evidence emerges that the highly mutated strain can evade the protection that normally stems from vaccination.
This could also explain why hospitalisations and deaths are not following the exponential growth in new cases.
The study from the South African Medical Research Council found that protection levels rose in the weeks and months after a booster dose was given to those who previously received the J&J vaccine.
It prevented 85 per cent of hospitalisations one to two months after the second shot was given, up from 63 per cent for people who received the booster within the past two weeks.
"The results are important and reassuring," said Professor Glenda Gray, the lead researcher and president of the South African Medical Research Council. The study, one of the largest of its kind in the world, "shows at a global level that this regimen can be useful," Prof Gray said in a telephone interview.
Almost half a million South African health workers were given J&J vaccines as part of a major trial ahead of the country's general roll-out earlier this year. They were offered boosters of the same single-shot dose starting in November, paving the way for this research.
The researchers tracked hospitalisations that occurred from Nov 8 through to Dec 17 in South Africa, when Omicron quickly became the dominant strain circulating in the nation. They compared the records of 69,092 health care workers who got the J&J vaccine to a matched group of unvaccinated individuals who were enrolled in the same managed care organisation.
The results are the first evidence that a second dose of the J&J shot given six to nine months after an initial injection is effective against severe infection caused by Omicron, the investigators said in the study, posted on medRxiv.org.
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