Wrong to immediately give Covid passes to Janssen recipients: Drug maker

The developer of the Janssen vaccine "never thought" that people would assume that they were protected against Covid-19 immediately after vaccination. "That was the wrong provision of information. Because indeed, many people immediately received their vaccination certificate, which was, of course, clumsy," said Hanneke Schuitemaker, head of vaccine development at pharmaceutical company Janssen, on Thursday evening on talk show Jinek.

Schuitemaker responded to the high wave of infections that arose after young people fully engaged in nightlife when they got a vaccination certificate immediately after a Janssen vaccine this past summer. "It's not that I thought something was going wrong; I have to call someone. I also read that in the newspaper, it's not that we have a hotline with Hugo de Jonge," said Schuitemaker. "I said to my own son: how strange that you immediately got a vaccination certificate. And then it was already clear that it was not going well."

At the end of June, Minister Hugo de Jonge of Public Health called the Janssen vaccine the "ideal vaccine if you really want to be done with that one shot, ready for the summer, ready for a summer full of festivals, dancing with Janssen." After the coronavirus restrictions were relaxed, young people, in particular, sought out the nightlife en masse for the first time in months. Some did so with government approval immediately after getting their jab with the Janssen vaccine. In practice, they were not protected against Covid-19 at all because vaccines need at least two weeks to work optimally.

When the number of coronavirus infections started to rise rapidly in early July, the interval between the jab and getting the green tick on the Coronacheck app was increased to two weeks. In August, it was decided that anyone who got the Janssen jab had to wait four weeks for a vaccination certificate. According to the Outbreak Management Team, the vaccine needs more exposure time than two weeks.