It may be less when it comes to launching a coronavirus vaccine.
Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine could have an advantage over Pfizer and Moderna’s blows – even though they are still a few weeks away from approval in the US, Wall Street analysts told The Post.
This is due to the fact that individual blows will be easier to distribute throughout the country than the regimes of its rival with two doses slowly entering the arms of the Americans.
“It’s not that long, given that I’m shooting for a single dose vaccine, which will certainly be more convenient,” CFRA research analyst Sel Hardy told The Post. “They have clear advantages in terms of logistics.”
J&J expects to release data from its large-scale vaccine study in late January and ask the feds to eliminate the shot for emergency use shortly thereafter. That would mean about two months after Pfizer and Moderna, which obtained emergency approvals in mid-December.
J&J is also studying a two-dose regimen, but only one dose has elicited an immune response in more than 90% of participants in an early clinical trial.
This means that every dose the New Jersey company produces could inoculate a person, potentially doubling its impact compared to Pfizer and Moderna jabs, according to Jeylan Mammadova of Third Bridge.
“If I say I have the capacity to produce a billion doses … that is, a billion people you vaccinate,” with a single vaccine, said Mammadova, the leader of the investment research firm’s global health care team. “If I make the same statement with Moderna and Pfizer, that’s only half.”
There is another key difference – J & J’s shot triggers an immune response in the body by providing a gene for coronavirus proteins “spike” through a common cold virus that can not make the recipient sick. This is a different method from the so-called messenger RNA found in Moderna and Pfizer vaccines.
J&J technology already has a strong track record – it was used to develop the company’s Ebola vaccine, which the European Union’s regulators approved in July last year. This could help reassure people who are skeptical of the new COVID-19 photos, according to analysts.
“Although it’s late, some people might think, ‘OK, I’m using a traditional vaccine platform,'” Hardy said. “There could be a problem of trust, a problem of perception, I would say, that could play to their advantage.”
Moreover, the J&J vaccine is expected to have a longer shelf life than the Modern and does not require ultra-cold storage, such as Pfizer, which must be kept at minus 94 degrees Fahrenheit to be efficient.
J&J estimates that its vaccine will remain stable for at least three months at standard refrigerator temperature and for two years in the freezer at minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit. Modern, on the other hand, can last up to only 30 days in the refrigerator and up to six months when frozen.
Despite these apparent benefits, analysts do not expect the vaccine to have a major impact on J&J’s results. The company said it intends to make the photograph available “non-profit for the use of the emergency pandemic” and has obtained research and development funding of approximately $ 454 million from the US government.
J&J will also eventually have to go hand in hand with other single-dose COVID vaccines from companies like Merck, which is later in development.
“I don’t think it makes any financial difference [J&J] even if it’s a fantastic victory, “Sam Fazeli, a senior pharmaceutical analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence, told The Post. “The question is whether this will be able to monetize beyond the pandemic.”