The best COVID-19 vaccine is ‘the one you get’

Emergency use authorization of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine, the third now available in the United States, has led to questions about which shot is the best.

In clinical trials, the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines were shown to be about 95% effective against COVID-19, while Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was 66.3% effective globally and 72% effective against the disease in the United States.

But comparing efficacies can be misleading, says Jeffrey Carson, a professor of medicine at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and principal investigator for Rutgers’ Johnson & Johnson trial, the second-largest in the country.

The statistics reflect only a snapshot of the time when the clinical trials were in progress, Carson says. “The best COVID-19 vaccine is the one you get,” he says.

Here, Carson discusses the common misperceptions about COVID-19 vaccine efficacy, which is how well a shot prevents disease and possibly transmission under controlled circumstances, and its effectiveness, which is how well it performs in the real world:

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