Early last month, I got my third covid vaccine shot. I now realize this was overkill, and I’m fairly embarrassed about it, but at the time I felt like I was operating in an information vacuum.
I participated in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine trial. Even though I initially got the placebo, the study offered me the opportunity to get the real thing weeks before I’d have otherwise been eligible, and I gratefully accepted. At the time, public health authorities were telling everyone to take the first shot you could get.
I’m still glad I followed this advice
But then things started to go wrong for J&J. At the end of March, news broke of problems at the Baltimore plant manufacturing the vaccine and eventually around 60 million doses were thrown away. In mid-April, federal authorities called for a pause on the use of J&J shots because, in very rare cases, they were linked to a blood-clotting disorder.
By then, I’d had my vaccine for a month. But I was anxious about what the problems with J&J meant for boosters.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
When I got my inoculation, I knew the company was testing a two-dose regimen, and I thought it was likely that I’d end up getting a second Johnson & Johnson shot. Suddenly, that seemed unclear.
In the following weeks, my uncertainty only grew.
In May, for example, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that vaccinated people don’t have to wear masks indoors, it was primarily based on findings that the mRNA vaccines manufactured by Pfizer and Moderna inhibit transmission.
So in May, with vaccines plentiful where I live, I went to a nearby clinic and got a Pfizer shot. At that point, I reasoned, European countries were already combining the AstraZeneca vaccine, which uses roughly the same mechanism as J&J, with mRNA shots.
No one at the clinic asked if I’d already been vaccinated.
But the experts weren’t telling people who’d gotten J&J much of anything. I reached out to a couple of high-profile physicians and scientists, but they didn’t answer me, perhaps out of reluctance to provide untested medical advice.
Some other people were quietly doing the same thing I had. Right after getting the Pfizer shot, I called the J&J trial to confess, in case the people running it needed me to drop out. The person I spoke to said that while it wasn’t ideal, I should keep participating and that I wasn’t the only volunteer who’d gone out and gotten a second vaccine.
The evidentiary void around J&J seemed to grow more frightening with the spread of the delta variant. With it, single-dose protection went down to around 35%.
For weeks, no one knew what that meant for the J&J vaccine. Angela Rasmussen, a virus expert at the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization at the University of Saskatchewan, had the Johnson & Johnson shot and heard from people who’d also gotten it and were scared.
“I really don’t blame people; they keep hearing all this stuff about two shots, two shots, delta, you need to be fully vaccinated,” she told me earlier this week. “And nobody’s really saying anything about Johnson & Johnson.” Many people, she said, “feel that they’ve been left behind because there really isn’t any new information coming out about it.”
Andy Slavitt, until recently a senior adviser to President Joe Biden’s pandemic response team, put out an episode of his podcast titled, “The Delta Variant Question No One Will Answer,” addressing those who’d received Johnson & Johnson and were wondering about getting another shot.
He was equivocal: Either wait for the data or “go ahead and take a Pfizer or Moderna shot.”
I wish I’d heard these voices earlier, because by then I’d already gotten two Pfizer shots.
Nothing bad happened, but the experts I spoke to said that the third shot was unnecessary and that there’s a point after which too much immune stimulation can be harmful.
Indeed, there may be no reason to get a booster at all. On Thursday evening, with discussion of boosting J&J all over the media, Johnson & Johnson released data showing that its vaccine retains most of its effectiveness against the delta variant.
It would be nice to have guidance on this from the CDC, but we shouldn’t expect it anytime soon.
So, as with many other aspects of this pandemic, people have to figure things out for themselves.
I’m glad that people with expertise are finally weighing in. I just wish this conversation had gone public a few weeks sooner.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.