Interim data released by the company had shown that the vaccine was found to be 57% effective against the South African variant (found in several countries now) - which was lower than the US results but still above FDA’s minimum requirement of 50%. But the FDA analysis revealed that the vaccine, in fact, showed an efficacy of 64% in South Africa after J&J did additional sequencing of the cases in the study (almost 95% of the cases in the trial were from the South African variant). “The fact that the numbers came up a little bit, once they fully analyzed the data from the time of the initial press release, shows that it’s not that different against the South African variant,” said Dr. Philip Grant, the lead investigator on the Stanford University arm of the J&J vaccine trial, reported CNN. “I think it’s going to have to be looked at more carefully, in terms of which vaccines are most effective in different locations.” Speaking of other locations, the efficacy in US was found to be 72% and above 68% in Brazil in preventing mild to severe disease in people. It offered almost 86% protection against severe disease in the US, 82% in South Africa and 88% in Brazil. “We’ll be seeing how much of an impact the variants have and how best these vaccines can address them, whether it will be booster doses, or other vaccines,” Dr. Aditya Gaur said, a co-lead investigator on the J&J trial at St. Jude in Memphis, according to the CNN report. “But I think one could not have asked for better from this first round of vaccine development from a standpoint of how quickly it has happened and how quickly it has started to roll out around the world.”