The roughly 17 million Americans who received Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine have been advised for more than a year that it is the least effective vaccine offered in the U.S., but new data suggests that may not be the case, The New York Times reported March 15.
The latest CDC data available, updated Jan. 22, suggests Johnson & Johnson's vaccine is slightly more protective than its mRNA counterparts. The data reveals unvaccinated people were 3.2 times as likely to contract COVID-19 as those who received Johnson & Johnson's single-dose vaccine, whereas they were 2.8 times as likely to contract COVID-19 as those who received two doses of Moderna's vaccine, and 2.4 times as likely as those who received two doses of Pfizer's vaccine.
"This vaccine platform may have some surprising characteristics that we hadn't anticipated." Larry Corey, MD, a vaccine expert at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, told the Times. He said the new data is "interesting, provocative, and we should spend more time understanding it."