whether people need to rethink their holiday plans to stay safe. we ll bring in marty makary, fox news medical contributor from johns hopkins university. a couple of things here. dana and i were talking during the break. cdc recommends pfizer and moderna over the j&j shot. is that significant? we re learning that j&j has this complication in women 30 to 50 years of age and it is a one in 100,000 risk of a blood clot. it doesn t matter which vaccine you get. now we re being a little more judicious and telling women in the age group to try another vaccine. some countries don t recommend moderna because of myocar diet is. hong kong study says omicron spreads 70 times faster.
94%, 95% protected against getting sick from covid-19 but soon after the johnson & johnson vaccine it was 72%. 72% is still a god vaccine, but it s not as good as moderna and pfizer s, so i think there s more of a feeling of urgency that a second shot is especially important for those who got johnson & johnson. now, ana, you mentioned mixing and matching. these vaccine experts will hear about a study where some people got pfizer and then as a booster got moderna and then as a booster got johnson & johnson and all of the possible combinations. what they found was that it worked and that it was safe and that actually folks who got johnson & johnson, they were actually better off getting a booster from pfizer or moderna rather than getting another johnson & johnson shot of the right now this is a relatively small study. just under discussion. there will be no recommendations today about mixing and matching. ana? elizabeth cohen, thank you. we ll eel stay on top of that
find a northwestern mutual advisor at nm.com right now a critical meeting on covid boosters is under way any minute. fda vaccine advisers are expected to vote on whether to recommend booster shots for millions of americans who receive the johnson & johnson vaccine. also on the agenda, mixing and matching boosters. new data suggests doing so appears to be safe and effective. i want to get right to cnn s elizabeth cohen who is following today s meeting for us. elizabeth, this fda advisory group voted yesterday to go forward and recommend moderna s booster under emergency use the
authorization. what can we expect today? i think today we can expect, ana, that they will also recommend a booster for those who got johnson & johnson, and it is possible that it will even be earlier, that maybe people who got it just say two months ago should be getting a booster now, that you don t have to wait the six months as has been instructed with moderna and pfizer. also, this booster may not be for everyone. even if you are the required amount of time after the original vaccination for pfizer and moderna, you still had to be over 65 or have other kind of high-risk things going on. so let s take a look at something that the head of this fda advisory committee said to me. he thinks that a booster for j&j is especially important after arnold monteau told me it s critical to get the j&j people more protected. they are starting at a lower level of protection. here s what the doctor meant by that. moderna and pfizer soon after their vaccination, folks were
elizabeth, talk to us about this decision. you know, this decision in many ways is very similar to the decision made for pfizer and moderna, that a booster shot is useful for a set of people, people over 65, people with certain underlying medical conditions and people in certain jobs, but there is a twist here. there is something that makes this j&j decision different, and that is for pfizer and moderna, you re supposed to wait six months after your original shot, your second shot to get the booster. this one says, hey, get your booster two months after getting your original johnson & johnson. in other words, you have to be at least two months out to get a johnson & johnson booster, not six months out, two months out, and so it s not entirely clear why the difference here, but i think one of the reasons is that as members of this committee have said to me is that there have been concerns that the johnson & johnson is not as effective as pfizer and moderna. it s about 72% effective in