COVID-19 Newsletter + 2 New Vaccines
Welcome to my new newsletter on COVID-19 and vaccines! By way of introduction, I’m a first year PhD student in Immunology at Stanford interested in infectious disease, vaccines, and global health. When I applied to graduate school, I had no idea we would be facing a global pandemic and that my research interests would become relevant to our daily lives. After almost a year of COVID-19, rampant disinformation, a rise in distrust in science, and public health failures, I wanted to make information about the COVID-19 pandemic, vaccines, and current science more accessible and readable. I’m currently doing a rotation working on COVID-19 research in Dr. Peter Kim’s lab. I’m not a doctor or an expert, but I do have a pretty good understanding of COVID-19 literature and have the privilege of regularly getting to talk to experts in the field. There are plenty of articles each day that can be overwhelming. The goal of these posts will be to simplify important information on COVID-19 into short newsletters with need-to-know updates on new science, health precautions, and vaccines so we can all stay safer and be more informed.
Some ideas I have so far of what I’ll write about includes new strains, vaccines, and answering any other questions that people may have (whether you know me or are reading this randomly).
Vaccine News
So as promised: two new vaccines from J&J and Novavax reported efficacy data in the past week and are both promising additions. I’m going to make another post about how all the different vaccine types work but today I’ll go through some of the good news about this data in light of new mutations emerging in the UK, South Africa and elsewhere.
The J&J vaccine is an adenovirus-based vaccine that is administered as one shot. One place I get a lot of my information (maybe a surprise to some) is Twitter! One of my favorite sources on COVID-19 immunology is @virusesimmunity aka Akiko Iwasaki. She’s a professor at Yale from Japan and I listen to everything she says. She summarized the J&J results in this tweet. The J&J vaccine showed 72% protection from moderate and severe disease in the US after 28 days. While preventing moderate disease is not as good as all symptomatic disease, preventing hospitalizations and death is incredibly important right now and 72% is impressively high if you’re not comparing to Moderna and Pfizer.
The other good news is that the vaccine showed efficacy, albeit lower, in Latin America (66%) and South Africa (57%). These are locations in which new, mutated viruses are spreading and the fact that this vaccine is still showing some efficacy is a good sign. The most important statistic is that all patients that received the vaccine were 100% protected from death after 28 days and 100% protected against death and severe disease after 49 days regardless of the spread of new virus variants.
A few months ago, I may not have taken this as good news, but given the rapid emergence of several concerning strains, the assurance that vaccines prevent hospitalizations and death regardless of mutations is great news. Healthcare systems globally are collapsing and we need this relief. In addition, a single shot vaccine will be much more accessible to the world and the storage conditions are a more manageable (up to 3 months in a normal refrigerator).
Novavax results also came out last week. With super high antibody responses in Phase I trials, efficacy data was highly anticipated. Novavax is a protein based vaccine given in 2 doses that can also be stored for up to 3 months in a refrigerator. It showed 89.3% efficacy in the UK and 60% efficacy in South Africa in preventing symptomatic disease. This is great news for vaccinating against the UK strain. The South African strain remains a challenge but there are several positives to note. One is that no one in the vaccinated arm of the trial had severe disease, was hospitalized, or died. So similarly to the J&J vaccine, this is still good news in reducing the burden of the pandemic. Another is that this vaccine showed some efficacy in people living with HIV. In South Africa the vaccine showed ~50% efficacy in people living with HIV and no one vaccinated was hospitalized. This efficacy, while low, in immunocompromised individuals is exciting. And protection from severe disease and death is important (have I said this enough times??).
That’s all for my first post, comment anything you’d like me to write about next or any questions that you have ❤ I’ll also recommend this Atlantic article that explains some of the basics (and complexities) of immunology in a really simple way and will be helpful to understanding COVID-19. Hope you enjoyed this first entry, let me know what you think!
p.s. Thanks to the usual suspects for their editing help
