Melanie Swift, M.D., COVID-19 Vaccine Allocation and Distribution: Adenovirus vaccines are not really new. Adenoviruses are really, really common and they're really ubiquitous viruses, and they tend to cause things like the common cold, pink eye, so really common but more minor infections.

An adenovirus vaccine is a virus that has been altered so that it can't make you sick, it can't replicate, it cannot integrate into your DNA, so they take out some really important parts of that virus genome.

What's done to the virus is that actually a little genetic snippet is exchanged and placed into the adenovirus that is actually from the COVID virus. It's the section of genetic code that codes for the spike protein. The adenovirus is like a Trojan horse, except that what it's delivering is a good thing, instead of delivering something that you don't want in your body. You get the vaccine, the adenovirus goes into your cell, it's got this Trojan horse code on it that makes the spike protein. That spike protein then goes to the surface of your cell and then your immune system recognizes it and starts to make antibodies to it.

In the end, what you get is your body makes the spike protein and you develop the immune response to that spike protein, exactly like you do with the Pfizer vaccine and the Moderna vaccine. The great news about this Johnson & Johnson vaccine is that it adds such a large supply of vaccine. This vaccine is stable at refrigerator temperatures for a longer period of time. It does not have to go into cold frozen storage the way that the messenger RNA vaccines are. That makes it much easier to deploy to a wider variety of places so it's going to be more widely available and will be able to vaccinate so many more people. The other good news is that one of Johnson & Johnson competitors, Merck, has now entered into an agreement to produce the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. So that will ramp up production capacity for the country much faster than we anticipated.

What people should know about this is that it is a very effective vaccine. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was studied in places where there were a lot of the new variant strains coming out. It still showed very high effectiveness, 85% at preventing severe COVID, and there were no deaths in the vaccine group who received the real vaccine.

We are in a situation where we need everyone vaccinated and we won't always have a choice of what vaccine we get. The vaccines are being allocated by the states and they're being allocated where they can be put to the best use. They are all really good vaccines. I would feel comfortable with my family members getting any one of the three that's available.

April 30, 2021