The general public will be able to start getting vaccinated at the beginning of May, pending the approval of a fourth Covid-19 vaccine, Health Minister Chris Fearne has announced.

Speaking on XTRA on TVM, Fearne said that the European Medicines Agency will meet to decide on the Johnson & Johnson vaccine in March, and the approval of this vaccine would push Malta’s vaccination timeline further forward.

Malta has 250,000 of these vaccines on order, Fearne said.

The vaccination process is already two weeks ahead of schedule with three vaccines – the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the Moderna vaccine, and the AstraZeneca vaccine – already in use.

With this fourth vaccine approved, Fearne said that the timeline would be pushed forward even further and that the vaccine can be offered to the general public as from the beginning of May – just three months away.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine, which is made by Janssen Pharmaceutica, a Belgium-based division of the company, is – significantly – a single-dose vaccine.

The vaccine is based on the virus’s genetic instructions for building the spike protein. But unlike the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines, which store the instructions in single-stranded RNA, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine uses double-stranded DNA.

Trials reported that the vaccine had 66% overall efficacy, however it was found to be 85% effective at preventing severe cases of Covid-19.