From Daily Wire
Johnson & Johnson, the company that received emergency use authorization for the first one-shot COVID-19 vaccine in the United States, reportedly plans to conduct clinical trials that extend beyond adults, including to younger teenagers and then infants.
According to The New York Times, Food and Drug Administration officials who reviewed the emergency authorization material at a meeting Saturday discussed Johnson & Johnson’s future trial plans. Those plans include conducting trials for healthy children between 12 and 18 years old, and then all children up to 18 years old, including newborns, to analyze safety and immune responses to the COVID-19 vaccine.
In trials beyond that, Johnson & Johnson also plans to test its one-shot COVID-19 vaccine in pregnant women, and then later, in another clinical study, in immunocompromised individuals, according to FDA advisory committee documents. A spokesperson for Johnson & Johnson told the Times that the company is planning to include children in future trials.
Although Johnson & Johnson is the third vaccine to be authorized for emergency use by the FDA, it’s the first vaccine to rely on a more widely tested vaccine technology — using a disabled adenovirus — instead of the newer mRNA technology utilized by Moderna and Pfizer. Dr. Ofer Levy, director of the Precision Vaccines Program at Harvard’s Boston Children’s Hospital and a member of the FDA advisory committee, told the Times that adenovirus vaccines have been used more than 200,000 times without any serious safety concerns.
Currently, no COVID-19 vaccines have been authorized for use in children, with the exception of the Pfizer vaccine, which has been authorized for individuals 16 years or older.
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