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.
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