Hello Dr. Syed. I am glad you are feeling better. Your discussions on Ivermectin had drawn me in and I finally had an opportunity to see a live stream today on the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. I wanted to express a few thoughts. Respectfully, I believe it is too early to pass judgment on the utility of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. You noted that the confidence interval was very wide on a number of subgroups. If you look at the Pfizer data submitted to the FDA, the confidence interval was also wide for Native Americans as well as other subgroups (page 27). Further, the data of these subgroups were most likely lumped together with the data from South Africa where 95% of the cases involved the variant B.1.351. We don't have any information of the efficacy to COVID for the mRNA vaccines versus these variants. Scientists only believe that the current vaccines will be efficacious against the variants for hospitalizations and death. And so far, that has also been the case with the Johnson and Johnson vaccine. The only thing that concerned me with the data was the labeling of moderate to severe disease. If someone had severe disease and wasn't hospitalized, what is severe disease? I bring up these points only because I was in the chat room during your review of the data and there was a lot of resistance to the J&J vaccine. I do not know the reason for the resistance, but if it is because of the data, I think that the data is premature to draw such conclusion. We need to compare apples to apples and if we can't, then we need to explain the caveat. If the goal is to prevent hospitalization and death, then the vaccine is success (so far). Would we be content with a vaccine that reduced SARS-CoV2 to a cold?
Johnson and Johnson Vaccine
DY - 2021-03-02 03:54:02
You answered several of these points in your follow up discussion. Thank you for sharing your thoughts even though you had not been feeling well. |