Dr. Amesh Adalja, Senior Scholar Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security joins the Yahoo Finance Live panel to discuss the latest COVID-19 vaccine news.

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine adding a new weapon to this fight against COVID-19, against the coronavirus. Its FDA approval over the weekend paving the way for four million doses to be shipped out immediately, with the first vaccinations delivered as early as tomorrow. Let's bring in Dr. Amesh Adalja. He is senior scholar of Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

Doctor, this is certainly good news when you consider how many people need the vaccine right now. But some of that good news potentially overshadowed by these concerns about the efficacy of the vaccine. What's the messaging to those who are looking to get this vaccine who are saying, maybe I should hold out for Pfizer or Moderna. Walk us through how you see these three vaccines now that they've come to market.

AMESH ADALJA: The way that I judge these vaccines is on what matters, their ability to prevent serious disease, hospitalization, and death. All three of these vaccines, Pfizer, Moderna, Johnson & Johnson do that tremendously well. So I have no qualms about the efficacy, because they are the path to ending this pandemic and stopping the damage that this virus is doing. So I would not hesitate to get the Johnson & Johnson vaccine if it's available to you.

And you have to remember also that when you look at these efficacy numbers, they weren't done in a head to head trial. These trials were against placebos. So it's very hard to make apples to apples comparisons among the vaccines. So that might not be fully valid when you look at those efficacy numbers. But again, I would focus on what we want these vaccines to do and that's prevent serious illness, and all of them are off the scales good when it comes to that.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah. When you think about the numbers of these coming out now, 3.1-- 3.9 million shots this week, but then none the week after. And you look into how much was promised, Johnson & Johnson said that they would be able to get $100 million by the end of June, but the numbers are coming in a little bit less below what that original contract had kind of predicted they would be able to deliver. When you look it though from the national scale, how much we're going to have for Americans here, it doesn't seem like that's the issue right now. So what are you looking at in terms of how many vaccines we have, since it seems like we're pacing to have more than enough?

AMESH ADALJA: Eventually, we will have more than enough vaccines to vaccinate the adult population. The key is how quickly can we do it, and I'm somebody that thinks that there should be no speed limit. We should be doing this 24/7. There should be no vaccine left on the shelves. And there are some states that do have vaccines left on the shelves.

We will get immediate benefits the more people we vaccinate. We are already seeing that in Israel. We're already seeing that with nursing home populations.

So I think the goal now is just to make this kind of an all out effort where no holds are barred and people are just getting vaccine into their arms in an assembly line process. And I think the Johnson & Johnson vaccine will make that easier, because it doesn't have cold storage, it's one and done, and you also just have to wait until-- the issue is you have to wait until we get enough doses to be able to do that. So just 3.9 million is really a drop in the bucket, but eventually, we will get more Johnson & Johnson vaccine and, I think, move at a much accelerated speed.

AKIKO FUJITA: And Doctor, I want to get back to that first answer you had there on the efficacy here. Because to your point, every health care official has said you need to get the vaccine that you can first get access to. But I wonder what more needs to be done on the education side of this in terms of the messaging, especially as we try to reach more and more of the more vulnerable communities, these essential workers who, you know, have questions potentially about why some were able to get the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine first and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is being pushed in some of these communities. What more needs to be done to educate people you think about just the safety of this vaccine particularly and its efficacy?

AMESH ADALJA: I think what we need to do is really go back to first principles. Why did COVID-19 even rise to our attention? It rose to our attention not because it was causing mild illness, but because it was causing serious illness, hospitalizations, and death. That's why a whole vaccine program was embarked upon to be able to stop the virus from doing that. To basically tame it or defang it with the vaccine. To make it more like our ordinary respiratory viruses or like the other coronaviruses that cause 25% of our common colds.

All of these vaccines do that. So whatever path you get to, whether that's the Moderna vaccine, the Pfizer vaccine, Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Novavax, it doesn't matter, because our goal in the end is to make this a tame virus. One that is no longer a public health emergency. One that will never threaten the hospital capacity. That's our overarching societal goal.

And the path through that is going to be getting a vaccine, and these vaccines all do that really well. They're all very safe, and the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has the added benefit of being one and done. That you can have one dose of the vaccine and you're likely done and you have that protection against serious illness. That's what we want to do and I think that's what we have to go back to is telling people, you know, we're not going to COVID zero. We're not getting rid of this or eradicating this virus. We're basically making it a much more manageable problem than it has been throughout this pandemic.

ZACK GUZMAN: Yeah. And I mean, just anecdotally, I mean, myself included, you hear once people's parents start to get their vaccines and get through that, people do take a sigh of relief once, you know, those odds are improved in terms of outcomes. But lastly, I mean, when we think about this return to normal, we keep hearing Dr. Fauci talking about wearing masks for longer. So how do you square maybe that jumping the hurdle of maybe reducing deaths and serious illness and kind of how much longer Americans should be bracing for having to wear masks into the future and when we can finally say, all right, this is back to life before the pandemic.

AMESH ADALJA: Once we get our vulnerable populations vaccinated-- right now, I think about 40% of those age 65 and above have been vaccinated-- then you're going to be less worried about spread, because everybody that could get hospitalized is protected through the vaccine. That's when I think you'll see some of those mask mandates lift. I think some people may wear masks longer, because they've gotten accustomed to them, maybe on public transit or in crowded places.

But the masks are going to be there until our until our hospital capacity is never going to be a concern. Meaning, we've gotten everybody that has the threat of being hospitalized, at least the majority of those individuals, vaccinated. So I think that's likely to be in the summer. But I think-- remember that just wearing a mask is not that big of a deal compared to all the other activities that will start to open up as we get our vulnerable populations vaccinated, and we're already starting to see that. So I think there's lots of reasons to be optimistic about this vaccine. It is the path forward to ending this pandemic and to getting our lives back.

ZACK GUZMAN: All right. Dr. Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Appreciate you coming back on. As always, be well.

Also a reminder, we're going to be showing you live here the latest in terms of Johnson & Johnson with the CEO Alex Gorsky joining us at 1:00 PM Eastern time right here on Yahoo Finance. You will not want to miss that interview. The latest from Johnson & Johnson on the rollout of their vaccine. Again, 1:00 PM Eastern time right here on Yahoo Finance.