CDC study shows good protection from mRNA booster plus J&J’s single-dose vaccine; White House launches test-to-treat Paxlovid site – Endpoints News

Con­cerns about rare but life-threat­en­ing blood clots have lim­it­ed the use of J&J’s Covid-19 vac­cine — once pitched as the on­ly one-shot op­tion in the mix — with the FDA cut­ting it off ex­cept in lim­it­ed cir­cum­stances. Yet there’s some good news for those who did re­ceive it: A sin­gle boost­er dose of an mR­NA vac­cine for re­cip­i­ents of a sin­gle prim­ing dose of Ad26.COV2.S (the J&J vac­cine) pro­vid­ed pro­tec­tion close to that of a three-dose mR­NA vac­cine reg­i­men.

That’s ac­cord­ing to a new analy­sis from the CDC that looked at the ef­fec­tive­ness of four vac­ci­na­tion reg­i­mens dur­ing a pe­ri­od when Omi­cron was the pre­dom­i­nant cir­cu­lat­ing vari­ant.

They were a sin­gle prim­ing dose of Ad26.COV2.S; a sin­gle prim­ing dose of Ad26.COV2.S plus a boost­er dose of Ad26.COV2.S (Ad26.COV2.S/Ad26.COV2.S); a sin­gle prim­ing dose of Ad26.COV2.S plus a boost­er dose of mR­NA vac­cine (Ad26.COV2.S/mR­NA); and two prim­ing dos­es of an mR­NA vac­cine plus a boost­er dose of mR­NA vac­cine (mR­NA/mR­NA/mR­NA)

The sci­en­tists then ex­am­ined test­ing da­ta span­ning more than 500,000 tests in or­der to de­ter­mine the re­spec­tive ef­fi­ca­cy of these reg­i­mens. As they wrote in a let­ter cor­re­spon­dence in the New Eng­land Jour­nal of Med­i­cine:

Our re­sults show that all the reg­i­mens that in­clud­ed a boost­er dose, as com­pared with no vac­ci­na­tion, of­fered pro­tec­tion against symp­to­matic omi­cron in­fec­tion (the 95% con­fi­dence in­ter­vals did not in­clude 0), al­though vac­cine ef­fec­tive­ness was high­est for the reg­i­mens that in­clud­ed a boost­er dose of an mR­NA vac­cine and was low­est for the ho­mol­o­gous Ad26.COV2.S/Ad26.COV2.S reg­i­men.

The re­sults “sup­port the cur­rent rec­om­men­da­tion of a boost­er dose of mR­NA vac­cine at least 2 months af­ter pri­ma­ry vac­ci­na­tion with sin­gle-dose Ad26.COV2.S or at least 4 months af­ter an Ad26.COV2.S boost­er dose,” the sci­en­tists added.

White House in­tro­duces new mod­el for dis­trib­ut­ing Pfiz­er’s Paxlovid

The Biden ad­min­is­tra­tion has launched its first test-to-treat site as part of a cam­paign to get more Paxlovid, the oral an­tivi­ral de­vel­oped by Pfiz­er, in­to pa­tients’ hands.

While pa­tients cur­rent­ly have to get a pre­scrip­tion from a health provider be­fore they can pick up a course of the drug, any­one who vis­its the clin­ic in Rhode Is­land will be able to get as­sessed by a med­ical provider and, if pre­scribed, grab their Paxlovid in one go.

The deal an­nounce­ment comes as the use of Paxlovid spikes in the US, sig­nal­ing not on­ly ris­ing case num­bers but more aware­ness of how to ac­cess it.