Single-dose COVID-19 vaccines arrived in Alaska this week, adding ‘another tool in the toolbox’

Thousands of doses of a new, single-dose COVID-19 vaccine developed by drug company Johnson & Johnson arrived in Alaska this week, and many of Alaska’s health leaders point to data that shows the new vaccine is a safe and effective option for protecting Alaskans against the coronavirus.

“It’s another tool in the toolbox to help us combat COVID-19,” said Dr. Bob Onders, administrator for the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, on Friday.

“The fact that it can be stored and transported in a standard refrigerator, and that it only requires one dose, provides Alaskans with more flexibility,” said Dr. Anne Zink, the state’s chief medical officer, in a statement.

The J&J vaccine is the third to receive an emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration. Alaska’s March allotment of vaccine included 8,900 Johnson & Johnson doses, in addition to more than 100,000 first doses of Moderna and Pfizer vaccine headed to the state this month.

Alaska this week became the first state to remove vaccine eligibility requirements by opening up appointments to anyone 16 or older who lives or works in the state — a move that was possible in part because of the extra vaccine arriving in the state this week.

By Friday, more than a quarter of Alaskans had received at one shot of vaccine, making Alaska one of the most-vaccinated states in the country.

As the new vaccine started to arrive this week, Alaskans have already been getting inoculated with the single-shot option.

The J&J vaccine, like the other two available shots, “has shown to be efficacious at the things we really want to prevent: hospitalization and severe complications including death from COVID-19,” Onders said. “What the CDC is recommending that everyone get the first vaccine that is available to them, and that is what we recommend, too.”

[Alaska coronavirus Q&A: What’s different about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine?]

Onders on Friday disputed an op-ed published this week by a Seattle-based public health physician who expressed doubts about clinical trial data, which he said seemed to suggest the new vaccine might not work as well for Alaska Natives.

Onders said the op-ed was concerning, misleading and not backed by data.

“The number of Alaska Natives and American Indians in the study, and what the author of the op-ed comments on, are too small to make any conclusions on whether the vaccine is better for one group of people versus another group,” Onders said. “It’s unfortunate that there’s underrepresentations of Alaska Natives and American Indians in the data, but what we know is that it generally works in all groups very well.”

In J&J’s clinical trials, even though there was only a small number of Alaska Native and American Indian people included, there were still lowered levels of severe complications from the virus and lowered rates of hospitalizations and deaths from the virus, Onders said.

“The other point is, he draws conclusions from the experience in Brazil, with Indigenous populations in South America, and concludes that it may have have an impact on the efficacy for Alaska Natives and American Indian people,” Onders said. “But we don’t really know that. And I think Brazil is a unique situation where there are different variants in Brazil that may change the outcomes” in the data.

“It’s concerning when people create unwarranted hesitancy in a situation where we know that the more people get vaccinated, the better off we will be,” Onders added.

A joint rebuttal to the original op-ed was recently published in Indian Country Today by a coalition of Native health experts.

“Suggestions that one vaccine does not provide protection against COVID-19 for a particular racial group have no plausible biological foundation and are not supported by the available evidence,” the second op-ed said.

Although the J&J vaccine was found in clinical trials to have slightly lower levels of efficacy than the two mRNA vaccines developed by Pfizer and Moderna, researchers have said that it’s difficult to compare those studies because they were done during different points in the pandemic.

[‘It feels good’: Almost a year into the pandemic, Alaska is vaccinating everyone]

The flexibility that comes with the J&J vaccine “may make it easier to keep it in village clinics for longer periods of time, because they don’t have ultra-cold freezers but they do have vaccine refrigerators,” Onders said.