By Dhirendra Tripathi

Investing.com – Johnson & Johnson stock (NYSE:) edged 0.3% higher Thursday in premarket trading as a real-world study showed that a booster of the drug maker’s single-dose Covid-19 vaccine was 84% effective at preventing hospitalization in South African healthcare workers who were infected with Omicron.

The study showed the J&J vaccine’s effectiveness at preventing hospitalization rose from 63% shortly after a booster was administered to 84% 14 days later. One to two months after the booster, the effectiveness reached 85%.

These findings are from a study that involved a booster shot with the same vaccine as homologous. They have not been peer-reviewed.

A separate study involving the application of the J&J booster in case of people initially vaccinated by Pfizer-BioNTech’s (NASDAQ:) two-dose BNT162b2 mRNA vaccine also threw up positive results against the mutant.

The second analysis showed the J&J booster generated 41-fold increase in neutralizing antibodies and a five-fold increase in immunity-enhancing T-cells against Omicron.

J&J has trailed Pfizer (NYSE: Moderna (NASDAQ:) In vaccinations in America, only three companies have been approved to market vaccines. The country’s only single-dose vaccine.

The company wasn’t seen as a big beneficiary of the FDA decision earlier to allow boosters – the time when Omicron wasn’t the threat it emerged to be — but with Omicron now raging in U.S. and rest of the world, the findings could boost its prospects.

The number of fresh Covid cases in America rose to 488,000 Wednesday according the New York Times. This is an unprecedented record.