we re seeing more than 300 members of the metropolitan police department not at work today because they have coronavirus. more than 300 members of the fire department not at work today because they have coronavirus. so this is really becoming a real problem. katy? dr. chu, let s talk about j&j, the vaccine. a lot of people not so happy with the j&j vaccine for a while, there was a lot of talk about side effects that it would have and there were questions about how effective it was. a new study, though, out today saying that perhaps the j&j vaccine is more effective against omicron and severe disease than the other, the booster at least, than the other shots. yeah, i think, katy, this is an exciting study. it provides real world data of how the j&j vaccine with a booster might perform. this is a look at nearly 70,000 health care workers in south africa who got an initial single
shot of j&j and six months later received a booster shot and looked at how that worked in terms of vaccine effectiveness in preventing hospitalizations. they found the effectiveness at preventing hospitalizations increased to 85% one to two months out from the booster. and, you know, again, this is very contemporaneous data. this is in the omicron era. so it provides a lot of confidence for how j&j may perform right now. and of course here in the united states, the standard, the recommendation has been to follow up a j&j with an mrna vaccine. but that is not practical for much of the globe, because of the storage requirements for mrna. so to restore faith in j&j over the most serious outcome is an extraordinary thing. and hopefully will even be relevant to people in the united states who cannot get mrna