Michael Lin, MD PhD 🧬 Profile picture
Assoc. Professor of Neurobiology & Bioengineering @Stanford ☘️🧪🦠🧠🌈🔬📖🇺🇲🌏Neurons, viruses, proteins, medicines. Bad manners blocked. Also @MichaelLinLab

Mar 15, 2022, 7 tweets

Great news for SA. They relied heavily on J&J and provide much knowledge about J&J's lower efficacy vs other vaccines. They've now joined most of the world in recommending 2 boosters after J&J.

Meanwhile the USA is still stuck on 1 booster only for JnJers.

And despite having been one of J&J's most vocal supporters, South Africa's health ministry is allowing heterologous boosting. That heterologous boosting works better than homologous boosting for J&J is now common knowledge.

In case we needed another reminder, a paper just came out last week (one I had analyzed as a preprint) showing J&J + 1xPfizer was much better than J&J + J&J, and similar to 2xPfizer, finally
sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

And regarding CDC data that JnJers in the US got Omicron at lower frequency than RNA recipients: such data are uninterpretable without splitting the groups by history of COVID and boosters. AFAIK boosted/infected/unboosted/naive were all grouped together.

It's exceedingly unlikely that unboosted uninfected 1xJ&J can more effective than unboosted uninfected 2xRNA vs Omicron because all the evidence is their nAbs are far lower. I covered this earlier

And in the controlled setting of monkey studies, a J&J booster clearly produces lower anti-Omicron Abs than a RNA booster, when added to either a 1xJ&J or 2xRNA primary series.

Thus serology predicts J&J blocks Omicron infection worse than RNA per dose

biorxiv.org/content/10.110…

Not to mention, as we knew, that JNJ x1 (Ad26 here) as an initial "vaccine" is far inferior in anti-Omicron antibodies to RNA x2 (BNT2x here), regardless of whether you boost with another RNA or a JNJ dose later.

Share this Scrolly Tale with your friends.

A Scrolly Tale is a new way to read Twitter threads with a more visually immersive experience.
Discover more beautiful Scrolly Tales like this.

Keep scrolling