enough, there s nowhere of a requirement going to be considered on vaccinated at some point? look, shannon, this goes back to the problem that you and i have been discussing for some time now, which is that we are using vaccination as a metric for when to stop, when to vaccinate, and when not to vaccinate. and really it s immunity that should be our focus. so in other words, yes, the vaccines do have an efficacy rate at higher in fact, 70% of them have worked perfectly fine. and really the way we would know is by assessing the actual clinical methods of immunity, which the gold standard is the antibody test. as you know on may 19th of 21, they ve discouraged for measuring antibody levels. when it comes to the police officers and places like new york and chicago, firefighters, these folks a lot of the folks are hesitant because they ve actually had
looking at here. it s a small study. they basically are measuring antibody levels. so, this is a laboratory study. so they re basically in the lab saying, okay, when we expose to this virus with this vaccine, how much antibodies do we get? how much do we get if we give a booster six months later. the antibodies increase nine fold compared to where they were 28 days after the first shot. so, that s a pretty significant increase. and i think it s probably going to be enough for johnson & johnson if this data is vetted and holds up to make the case that people should get boosters around the country. some places like san francisco are already doing it. i always say we have to take this data with a little caution. again, it s laboratory data. how well does the vaccine actually hold up in the real world? sometimes antibodies are a good measure. but there s lots of kpcomponent to the immune system. johnson & johnson those numbers
battling kcovid in the hospital. that s the highest number at any point during this pandemic. so, joining us now is cnn chief medical correspondent dr. sanjay gupta. sanjay, this decision from the fda came overnight the decision to authorization a third shot for the immunocompromised. how significant is this? i think it s really significant for that group of people. 9 to 10 million people that we re talking about. not surprising for all the reasons you just mentioned. i mean, i think there s been increasing evidence of two important things, one is that they ve been measuring antibody levels. they see the antibody levels have waned, but also that these people were more likely to end up in the hospital, more likely to get severely ill. it s really a combination of those two things. measuring antibody levels alone may not be the thing that everyone is focussing on, but the fact that people are getting sick. show you who we re talking about here. immunocompromised, this is something that