Dr. Anthony Fauci on Sunday said he believes Johnson & Johnson should’ve doled out a two-dose COVID-19 shot — as health experts recommend getting a booster to the one-shot jab as soon as it becomes available.
The White House chief medical advisor said that the unanimous decision Friday by the Food and Drug Administration advisory panel to recommend the booster shots should be welcomed news for recipients of the vaccine.
“I think that they should feel good about it because what the advisors to the FDA felt, is that given the data that they saw, very likely, this should have been a two-dose vaccine to begin with,” Fauci told ABC anchor Martha Raddatz on “This Week.”
“I think it’s very favorable for those who have received the J&J vaccine. I don’t see that as a problem at all,” he added.
The booster is still awaiting the official green light from federal regulators, though they often follow the panel’s recommendation.
Fauci, however, acknowledged that some J&J recipients might be better off receiving Pfizer or Moderna’s vaccine as their booster.
“You know, that is true the data you refer to that if you [get the booster], people who have originally received J&J with either Moderna or Pfizer, the level of antibodies that you induce in them is much higher than if you boost them with the original J&J,” he said.
But he said that the recommendations for J&J booster recipients will likely consider the risks that come with each of the vaccines — including that Moderna and Pfizer carry a slightly increased risk of experiencing myocarditis for young adults.
“I think it’s going to be variable depending upon who you are. For example, a woman of childbearing age who’d would have almost no issues at all with a possible adverse event of myocarditis — which you see, rarely…with the mRNA vaccine — that person might want to opt for that approach,” he said.
“If you’re a young man who does have that very, very rare risk of getting myocarditis, you might want to take the J&J route.”
Experts are now urging those who received the J&J shot to get the booster immediately.
“J&J is a very good vaccine. I also believe it’s probably a two-shot vaccine,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, told CNN Saturday. “It’s really urgent that people get that second shot pretty quickly.”