A single dose of the Janssen coronavirus vaccine has been shown to protect 66% from infection and 100% protection from hospitalisation or death, in a 44,000 participant international trial.
A single dose of the vaccine developed by Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical subsidiary Janssen has been shown in a large international trial to be 66% effective in preventing coronavirus infection.
Critically, no one in the trial who received the Janssen vaccine needed hospital treatment or died from coronavirus after the vaccine took effect.
These results raise hopes of good results for an ongoing phase 3 Janssen trial, testing two doses of the vaccine, led in the UK by Southampton’s Professor Saul Faust.
Single dose effective
These results, based on nearly 44,000 participants and 468 cases of Covid-19, show the Janssen vaccine is effective as a single dose.
Those effects, combined with its ability to be stored at standard fridge temperatures, indicate significant practical benefits for vaccination programmes around the world. The UK has ordered 30 million doses.
The Janssen vaccine uses a common cold virus, genetically modified to make it harmless and to look more like the Sars-CoV2 coronavirus to the body’s immune system, training it to recognise and fight coronavirus.
Taking part in vaccine trials
Many types of vaccine are likely to be needed to end the pandemic, with different approaches to creating vaccines being taken to understand what protects different people in different ways, and to offer alternative production and usage methods.
If you would like to take part in COVID-19 vaccine trials in the UK, please sign up to the NHS COVID-19 vaccine research registry.
Anyone living in the UK can sign up online to take part in the trials through the NHS, giving permission for researchers to contact you if they think you’re a good fit. Once you sign up, you can withdraw at any time and request that your details be removed from the COVID-19 vaccine research registry. The process takes about 5 minutes to complete.
The registry particularly needs volunteers who are most vulnerable to the effects of coronavirus, including frontline health and social care workers and people from Black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds.
A single dose of the Janssen coronavirus vaccine has been shown to protect 66% from infection and 100% protection from hospitalisation or death, in a 44,000 participant international trial.