AVAILABILITY:
Text updates: The City of San Antonio announced Wednesday that they’ve partnered with some of the Bexar County vaccine distribution sites to create a vaccine availability text alert system to keep the community informed about the release of more COVID-19 vaccines.
Individuals who decide to opt-in, can text VACCINE to 55000 or in Spanish VACUNA to 55000 starting Wednesday. By signing up they will receive a text notifying them which locations have available appointments.
EFFICACY:
COVID-19 Vaccines: Efficacy of J&J Vaccine / Real-World Study of Pfizer-BioNTech Effectiveness
By Kelly Young
Edited by Susan Sadoughi, MD, and Richard Saitz, MD, MPH, FACP, DFASAM
Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine, known as Ad26.COV2.S, offers significant protection against COVID-19, according to an FDA analysis posted in advance of Friday’s vaccine advisory committee meeting. The vaccine is a replication-incompetent adenovirus-vectored vaccine encoding a stabilized variant of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein.
Friday’s meeting is to determine whether the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks. The company is seeking an emergency use authorization for vaccination in people ages 18 and over.
In a trial of 40,000 participants, the vaccine’s overall efficacy against moderate-to-severe/critical COVID-19 was 67% for cases occurring at least 2 weeks after vaccine receipt. Vaccine efficacy was somewhat higher in the U.S. (74%) than South Africa (52%), where the dominant strain has been the B.1.351 variant.
The most commonly reported adverse reactions were injection site pain (49%), headache (39%), fatigue (38%), and myalgia (33%). The FDA details several serious adverse events likely related to the vaccine, including a hypersensitivity reaction that didn’t meet the criteria for anaphylaxis and a case of severe systemic reactogenicity.
In other vaccine news, the Pfizer-BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine appears to be over 90% effective against COVID-19 in the real-world setting — consistent with results from the vaccine’s phase 3 clinical trial — according to an analysis of Israel’s mass-vaccination campaign in the New England Journal of Medicine.
From Dec. 20, 2020 to Feb. 1, 2021, nearly 600,000 vaccine recipients were matched to unvaccinated controls. Beginning 7 days after the second dose, the vaccine’s effectiveness for documented infection was 92%; for symptomatic illness, 94%; for hospitalization, 87%; and for severe disease, 92%. In addition, the vaccine was estimated to be 90% effective against asymptomatic infection, which could have implications for transmission.
https://www.fda.gov/media/146217/download
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2101765
