J&J Covid vaccine recipients will be able to receive supplemental Pfizer or Moderna doses in San Francisco

August 5, 2021: -On Tuesday, the San Francisco Department of Public Health and Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital said they are allowing patients who received Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine to get a second dose introduced by either Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna.

J&J recipients can request to get a “supplemental dose” of an mRNA vaccine, city health officials said to CNBC, declining to call the second doses “boosters.” J&J’s vaccine requires only a single dose, and recipients are considered fully vaccinated two weeks after getting the dose.

On Tuesday’s call with reporters, San Francisco health officials said they allow patients to get the extra doses due to residents’ high number of requests. They maintained that J&J’s vaccine is highly effective against the virus and its variants.

“We have gotten requests based on patient’s talk to their physicians, and that’s why it is allowed the accommodations,” Naveena Bobba, deputy director of health at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said.

Health officials said they do not recommend booster doses at this time, aligning with guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“This move does not represent a change in policy for SFDPH,” the public health department said. “We continue to align with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance and do not suggest a booster dose at this time. We will continue to review any new data and adjust our guidance, if necessary,” the department added.

The CDC does not recommend Americans mix Covid doses in most circumstances, and federal health officials say booster doses of the vaccines are not required at this time.

The announcement from San Francisco health officials came as some Americans say they are in search of ways to get additional doses of the Covid vaccines, with some even going as far as getting the extra doses from different companies because of the concerns about the highly contagious delta variant.

Last month, Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Georgetown University, told CNBC that she received a booster dose of Pfizer and BioNTech’s Covid-19 vaccine in June, two months after she received J&J’s single dose. She said she was concerned about her protection level against delta after studies suggested a single dose of a Covid vaccine was inadequate.

Since Rasmussen received her booster dose, a new study has suggested the J&J vaccine is much less effective against the delta and lambda variants than against the original virus.