Mary Rogers, a registered nurse with Carilion Clinic, received a COVID-19 vaccination from Director of Retail Pharmacy Operations Adrian Wilson in December 2020. Photo courtesy Carilion Clinic.
More than 90,000 Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine doses are arriving in Virginia now through Thursday, the state vaccine coordinator said Wednesday afternoon.
According to Dr. Danny Avula, 69,000 doses of the one-shot vaccine are heading to local health districts, and retail pharmacies will receive 22,000 doses, which will be administered from Friday through early next week. All vaccination events offering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be labeled as such, he added, and anyone who is contacted for an appointment who wants to wait for one of the two-dose vaccines from Moderna or Pfizer will not lose their place in line.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which received emergency use approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Saturday, has a lower efficacy rate than the other two vaccines, which have 95% effective rates, but public health experts have said that if a person is offered a Johnson & Johnson shot, they should feel comfortable taking it. With a 72% effectiveness rate at preventing COVID and 86% effectiveness in preventing serious illness, the one-dose vaccine is still a good vaccine, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, said earlier this week. The vaccine helps move the country toward herd immunity, and it provides protection against COVID variants from the United Kingdom, Brazil and South Africa, according to the FDA.
