By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Johnson & Johnson stock (NYSE:JNJ) edged 0.3% higher Thursday in premarket trading as a real-world study showed that a booster of the drug maker's single-dose Covid-19 vaccine was 84% effective at preventing hospitalization in South African healthcare workers who were infected with Omicron.
The study showed the J&J vaccine's effectiveness at preventing hospitalization rose from 63% shortly after a booster was administered to 84% 14 days later. Effectiveness touched 85% at one to two months post-boost.
The findings were from a study involving a homologous (same vaccine) booster shot. The findings have not been peer-reviewed.
A separate study involving the application of the J&J booster in case of people initially vaccinated by Pfizer-BioNTech's (NASDAQ:BNTX) two-dose BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine also threw up positive results against the mutant.
The second analysis showed the J&J booster generated 41-fold increase in neutralizing antibodies and a five-fold increase in immunity-enhancing T-cells against Omicron.
J&J has trailed Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) and Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA) in vaccinations in the U.S., which has approved only these three firms to market their vaccines in the country. It is also the only single-dose vaccine available in the country.
The company wasn’t seen as a big beneficiary of the FDA decision earlier to allow boosters – the time when Omicron wasn’t the threat it emerged to be -- but with Omicron now raging in U.S. and rest of the world, the findings could boost its prospects.
Fresh cases of Covid topped 488,000 on Wednesday in the U.S., according to the New York Times, a new record.