Vaccine Protocols

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Anchor lead: With another new Covid vaccine added to the mix, what concerns remain? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Johnson and Johnson’s Covid-19 vaccine is now being deployed nationally along with the two previously authorized ones, yet having enough doses for everyone remains an issue and with new variants of the virus popping up, efficacy is also a concern. Brian Garibaldi, a critical care medicine expert at Johns Hopkins, comments.

Garibaldi: It seems like we’ve been doing this forever with Covid but it’s important to remember that it’s been a year. So there are a lot of questions that still remain about these vaccines. Perhaps the most important is how long the vaccine provides you with protection and the short answer is we don’t know because the first people haven’t been vaccinated for all that long. The other question is can we deviate safely from the protocols that have been studied in these vaccine trials and still provide people protection. Now that there’s been wider rollout of the vaccines we can actually study and see what that protection might be.   :29

Garibaldi says that studies regarding durability of protection as well as how well the vaccines match up to circulating viruses are active areas of research. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.