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Plunging Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Supply Dents State Inoculation Efforts - msnNOW
Apr 11, 2021 2 mins, 32 secs

WASHINGTON — Supplies of Johnson & Johnson’s one-dose coronavirus vaccine will be extremely limited until federal regulators approve production at a Baltimore manufacturing plant with a pattern of quality-control lapses, the White House’s pandemic response coordinator said on Friday.

That will be followed by another 5 percent decrease the next week, state officials said on Friday.

Officials in a broad band of states said the sudden drop in Johnson & Johnson supply would significantly slow inoculation efforts.

Some state health officials had hoped to use Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot, easily stored vaccine to target college students and other transient groups.

Instead, shipment of doses of Johnson & Johnson next week will drop severely in states: California will fall from 572,700 to 67,600 doses, Texas from 392,100 to 46,300, Florida from 313,200 to 37,000 and Virginia from 253,400 to 27,900.

But as recently as late February, federal officials were projecting weekly deliveries of more than four million doses of the company’s vaccine in April, a significant increase to the nation’s vaccine stock.

Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus coordinator, said on Friday that the administration did not plan to shift additional vaccine doses to hard-hit states like Michigan.

Johnson & Johnson discovered last month that Emergent workers had contaminated a batch of vaccine and was forced to discard the equivalent of 13 million to 15 million doses.

A separate team will most likely conduct the review of the plant that determines whether the F.D.A.’s authorization for Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine should be expanded to doses manufactured there, according to people familiar with agency procedures.

Because regulators from the Food and Drug Administration have so far not certified the plant, none of the other 62 million Johnson & Johnson doses already manufactured there can be distributed to the public.

Zients said that Johnson & Johnson was installing new senior leadership and that AstraZeneca, another vaccine that has not been federally authorized for use in the United States, would no longer be manufactured there.

Zients said Johnson & Johnson ultimately expected to be able to deliver as many as eight million doses weekly from the Baltimore plant.

Federal officials said that Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech may together be able to ship up to an extra two and a half million doses a week.

But that would still fall short of the more than four million doses a week the government had been expecting from Johnson & Johnson.

Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, said that health officials had been using the Johnson & Johnson vaccine largely to inoculate college students and for its mass vaccination sites, but were surprised to learn that significant numbers of residents were requesting the vaccine by name.

“The recent event that caused the loss of about 15 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has affected the D.O.D.

He said the drop in supply to 8,000 doses next week from 67,000 this week was a blow to the state’s momentum.

Kanter said that the White House officials had not connected the Baltimore factory mistake to the drop in supply next week

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