Johnson & Johnson's single-dose coronavirus vaccine is much less effective against the highly contagious Delta variant than it is against the original virus, new research claims.
"The message that we wanted to give was not that people shouldn't get the J&J vaccine, but we hope that in the future, it will be boosted with either another dose of J&J or a boost with Pfizer or Moderna," study author Nathaniel Landau, a virologist at NYU's Grossman School of Medicine, told The New York Times.
The troubling news came the same day that Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told lawmakers that the Delta variant now accounts for 83% of new coronavirus cases in this country.
"This is a dramatic increase, up from 50% for the week of July 3," Walensky said during a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday.
As worrying as the J&J vaccine findings are, they came from experiments on blood samples in a laboratory, and may not reflect the vaccine's performance in the real world, theTimes reported. But mounting evidence is suggesting that the 13 million Americans who have gotten the J&J vaccine may need a second dose.
