Rishard Khan

rishard_khan@guardian.co.tt

A ship­ment of John­son & John­son (J&J) Janssen COVID-19 vac­cines will ar­rive in T&T next week from Africa. 

Last week, the Africa CDC an­nounced the roll­out of 400 mil­lion vac­cine dos­es to the African Union Mem­ber States and the Caribbean.

The roll­out be­gan over the week­end. T&T will be among five oth­er Caribbean is­lands to re­ceive dos­es. The oth­er is­lands are Ja­maica, Bar­ba­dos, Guyana, St Kitts & Nevis and the Ba­hamas. 

Guardian Me­dia was un­able to get in­for­ma­tion on its ex­pect­ed ar­rival date and quan­ti­ties from Min­is­ter of For­eign and CARI­COM Af­fairs Dr Amery Browne, who did not re­spond to mes­sages yes­ter­day.

How­ev­er, well-placed sources in­di­cat­ed the ship­ment of sin­gle-dose vac­cines will ar­rive ear­ly next week. 

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from the Min­istry of Health on Feb­ru­ary 24, the coun­try had signed off on the pur­chase of COVID-19 vac­cines via the African Med­ical Sup­plies Plat­form (AM­SP).

On June 5, Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley in­di­cat­ed that T&T had or­dered 800,000 J&J dos­es through the plat­form. 

This, how­ev­er, will not be the first J&J dos­es to ar­rive on our shores. In Ju­ly, 20 dos­es were do­nat­ed to the coun­try by the gov­ern­ment of South Africa to in­oc­u­late Olympic-bound ath­letes. How­ev­er, the Min­istry of Sport and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment said they would be used to in­oc­u­late T&T ath­letes trav­el­ling for up­com­ing re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tions. These dos­es were ad­min­is­tered be­tween Wednes­day and Thurs­day, ac­cord­ing to the Min­istry of Health’s dai­ly up­dates.

On­ly on Thurs­day, the coun­try re­ceived 305,370 dos­es of the Pfiz­er-BioN­Tech Comir­naty (mR­NA) vac­cine as a do­na­tion from the Unit­ed States.

While plans were al­ready di­vulged to give sec­ondary school stu­dents the first use of these dos­es, it is still un­clear how the J&J jabs will be de­ployed in­to the na­tion­al vac­ci­na­tion pro­gramme. 

The vac­cine was giv­en World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion (WHO) Emer­gency Use Au­tho­ri­sa­tion (EUA) on March 12. Just like the Ox­ford-As­traZeneca/Co­v­ishield al­ready in use lo­cal­ly, the J&J is a vi­ral vec­tor vac­cine.

This means it us­es a mod­i­fied ver­sion of a dif­fer­ent virus (called the vec­tor) to de­liv­er in­for­ma­tion on how to com­bat COVID-19 to one’s im­mune sys­tem.

This does not mean SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that cas­es COVID-19) is in­ject­ed in­to the body or will give you COVID-19.

The vac­cine per­formed just as well as the As­traZeneca/Co­v­ishield vac­cine in clin­i­cal tri­als. The Cen­tres for Dis­ease Con­trol and Pre­ven­tion (CDC) in the Unit­ed States puts its ef­fi­ca­cy at 66.3%.

How­ev­er, like all vac­cines, it takes some two weeks af­ter re­ceiv­ing the jab to de­vel­op im­mu­ni­ty.