Johnson & Johnson begins two-dose vaccine trial for COVID-19

American pharmaceutical and medical devices giant Johnson & Johnson is one of the candidates which is in the race to come up with a promising vaccine for COVID-19. The company has started trials of its experimental vaccine and this time it is trying its two-dose vaccine regimen. Johnson & Johnson has said that it will be vaccinating 30,000 people with the two-dose vaccines.

So far it has tested its single dose vaccine on 60,000 people. The trial of the single dose vaccine had started off in late September, 2020. For the new trial, the volunteers will either be getting the vaccine or a dummy vaccine and the second dose of it will be administered 57 days after the first one. For now the study is conducted in the United States along with France, Germany, Colombia, South Africa, Philippines, United Kingdom and Spain. The above locations were selected as these countries have faced a high number of infections since the pandemic began.

Johnson & Johnson has assured that it is being careful, detailed and very thorough in terms of testing different doses and dosing patterns to study about its effectiveness in the long term. A small study has found that the vaccine helped to trigger a strong immune response that was also well tolerated by the volunteers.

The COVID-19 vaccine is something that the world is waiting for and a number of candidates across the globe are contemplating. Most of the companies are in the final and the most crucial stage of human trials and after the trials are over, it would be up to the respective authorities to approve the most promising vaccine. The pandemic broke out in December 2019 in the Wuhan city of China. Since then the virus has managed to spread in different parts of the world that triggered a complete lockdown in a number of countries as a safety measure.

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