The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is the first Covid-19 vaccine that only requires one shot

As of March 1, approximately 96,402,490 Covid-19 vaccine doses have been delivered and 76,899,987 vaccines have been administered according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

This comes as the FDA has authorized the use of Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose Covid-19 vaccine for people 18 and older. The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is now the third approved vaccine being distributed in the U.S.

According to ABC News, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is a viral vector vaccine and is made from an inactivated adenovirus which is the virus that causes the common cold. The vaccine contains a piece of DNA that instructs the body to make the Covid-19 spike protein.

This then triggers an immune response giving you protection if you become exposed to the virus in the future.

There were questions about how well the Johnson & Johnson vaccine works compared to the other two available vaccines. In clinical trials, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was found to be 85% effective in preventing severe/critical illness and 66% effective in preventing symptomatic illness 28 days after the vaccination. The vaccine was 100% effective in preventing hospitalization and death from Covid-19.

This is compared to Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines which have been found to be 95% and 94.1% effective in preventing symptomatic illness. However, the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were tested before the new Covid-19 variants were detected whereas the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was tested against the new variants and still performed well.

The FDA’s standard for authorization and approval of Covid-19 vaccines is at least a 50% efficiency in preventing systematic disease.

So far the CDC hasn’t mentioned whether the one-does vaccine will be recommended to certain people over the two-shot vaccines.