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March 31, 2021 For the Johnson & Johnson vaccine "We were able to develop Covid vaccines so quickly because we already had decades of vaccine work," explained Dan H. Barouch, professor of medicine and immunology at Harvard Medical School in Boston, in a virtual conference .



The laboratory he directed has developed the Janssen single-dose Covid vaccine, distributed by Johnson & Johnson, recently approved for emergency use by the US Food and Drug Administration (Fda) and the European Medicines Agency (Ema ).



For the Janssen vaccine, which uses a monkey adenovirus to stimulate the immune response, Barouch said he had "used AdVac technology, which we began developing in 2003 to produce an experimental HIV vaccine."

This vaccine platform, he continued, "was also used in 2016 to develop the experimental vaccine against the Zika virus".

The same technology was used for Janssen's Ebola vaccination regimen, approved by the EU Commission.



Barouch further explained that a single dose was found to be sufficient in monkeys when testing the vaccine against Zika.

And with a single dose, he stressed, "the immune response continues to grow even 10 weeks after inoculation. We can say that it increases for months and then stabilizes." 



The phase 3 clinical trials on the Covid vaccine, added the scientist, "have shown that the Janssen vaccine is 85% safe and effective for severe forms of Covid in all regions where the study took place (USA, Latin America, South Africa) and in all the subgroups examined and also against the more resistant variants ".



Johnson & Johnson, he said, has made a commitment to produce at least one billion doses of the vaccine this year.