Two reports released Thursday show that people who get booster doses of Johnson & Johnson's Janssen vaccine are well protected against severe disease and hospitalization from the Omicron variant of coronavirus, the company said.
Researchers said the findings indicate that most of the Covid-19 vaccines will protect people against the worst outcomes from infection -- and show some of the emphasis on how the various vaccines affect immune system components called antibodies may be misleading.
Linda-Gail Bekker of the University of Cape Town and other researchers including a team at the South African Medical Research Council helped examine the results of an ongoing study of the J&J vaccine there. They looked at results from 69,000 health care workers. "Even before you factor in the increased infectiousness of Omicron, we have to remember that healthcare workers on the frontlines are at a greatly increased risk of being affected by COVID-19 in the first place," Dr. Glenda Gray, president and CEO of the SAMRC, said in a statement.
Using the J&J vaccine as a booster for people who originally got two doses of Pfizer/BioNTech's vaccine generated a 41-fold increase in neutralizing antibodies and a five-fold increase in the CD8 killer T cells that destroy cells infected by the virus. That stops the virus from replicating and spreading. Boosting with the Pfizer vaccine generated a 17-fold increase in neutralizing antibodies and a 1.4-fold increase in CD8 T cells four weeks later, they found.
Barouch said many studies look only at antibodies, which can stop the virus from infecting cells at all. He said the T-cell response, which is trickier to measure, is important in providing long-term protection from severe disease.
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