February 24, 2021

A Stable One-Shot COVID Vaccine Is Deemed Safe and Effective

Paul Christian Gordon/Zuma

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Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot coronavirus vaccine is highly effective at preventing severe disease and death from COVID-19, the Food and Drug Administration found in analyses published today.

An international study found the vaccine’s efficacy rate to be 72 percent in the United States and 64 percent in South Africa, where a more contagious variant is spreading. While these figures are lower than Pfizer’s and Moderna’s efficacy rates, the vaccine greatly reduces the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 and could play a key role in keeping the pandemic at bay. In a clinical trial of 40,000 people, no one who took the vaccine was hospitalized or died of COVID-19 after the vaccine took effect.

Plus, the vaccine requires only one shot and does not need special refrigeration—good news at a time when demand for vaccines greatly outstrips supply.

The FDA could authorize the vaccine for emergency use as early as Saturday, with 20 million doses available by the end of March and a total of 100 million doses delivered by the end of June.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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