After a mistake at a Baltimore factory last week that ruined millions of doses of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, the Biden government is putting Johnson & Johnson in charge of the plant, it announced on Saturday.
The plant, which belongs to the emerging contractor BioSolutions, previously produced two varieties of the Covid-19 vaccine, of which only the Johnson & Johnson injection was approved for emergency use in the United States. Now Johnson & Johnson will be the only vaccine produced at the facility when the company takes control, the New York Times reported on Saturday.
The Johnson & Johnson injection, authorized by the Food and Drug Administration in late February, is a single injection vaccine, unlike the mRNA-based Covid-19 vaccines produced by Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna, which require two doses to be fully effective. , and it only requires a refrigerator, instead of a freezer, to store.
It is also extremely effective – clinical test results suggest that it avoids around 85 percent of “serious and critical cases of Covid-19” and 100 percent of deaths and hospitalizations after four weeks – despite some initial concerns about how the injection of Johnson & Johnson compares against the shots of Pfizer and Moderna.
As Umair Irfan of Vox explained last month,
[Johnson & Johnson] reported that their overall effectiveness in preventing Covid-19 cases that produced symptoms was 66.1 percent. The Moderna vaccine and the Pfizer / BioNTech vaccines reported levels of effectiveness around 95 percent.
This gap in efficacy numbers is fueling some people’s perception that the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine is not so good.
According to Dr. Amesh Adalja of Johns Hopkins University, however, this direct comparison is worrying and vaccines are “basically interchangeable”.
“I don’t even look at those effectiveness numbers and compare them face to face like that,” said Adalja to Vox. “Biostats 101: You can’t compare test results like that, unless they were done directly.”
In a statement, Johnson & Johnson said it was “taking full responsibility” for manufacturing at the Baltimore plant and that it would “significantly” increase its personnel there.
According to the Times, the error that precipitated Saturday’s announcement – and ruined about 15 million doses of vaccine – came after a confusion between distinct vaccine vectors used by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, which are incompatible.
However, Johnson & Johnson emphasized in a statement on Wednesday that it would continue to seek emergency use authorization for Emergent’s facilities in Baltimore, and that it would still meet its vaccine delivery goals.
Johnson & Johnson is expected to deliver around 24 million additional doses of vaccine by the end of April, and nearly 100 million in total by the end of May. President Joe Biden has pledged that all US adults will be eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine by May 1 and recently set a new goal of 200 million vaccines at the end of his first 100 days in office.
In a statement on Saturday, AstraZeneca, which developed the other vaccine being produced at the Emergent plant in Baltimore, said it was working to “identify an alternative location” for manufacturing.
The United States invested in storing AstraZeneca doses for use in the United States last year, in anticipation of an emergency use authorization that has not yet materialized, according to the New York Times.
Even before Saturday, however, AstraZeneca’s Covid-19 vaccine had a complicated situation, as the company expects it to become the fourth coronavirus vaccine to receive an emergency use authorization in the United States.
In March, an independent advisory board from the National Institutes of Health criticized the company for using “outdated and potentially misleading” effectiveness data in a press release, according to Umair Irfan of Vox; since then, AstraZeneca has released more complete data showing a slightly lower – but still strong – effectiveness rate of around 76 percent.
Separately, there was a wave of concern last month after regulators in several European countries stopped distributing the AstraZeneca vaccine due to concerns about blood clots, but the European Union concluded that the injection was “safe and effective”.
Despite the findings of the EU regulatory agency, the AstraZeneca vaccine has not yet been authorized for use in the United States; consequently, the Biden government announced in March that it would send doses of AstraZeneca from the United States stock to Canada and Mexico, which have already approved the vaccine.
The US mass vaccination effort is accelerating
Despite setbacks for Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca last month, news about vaccines in the U.S. is overwhelmingly good now. With three coronavirus vaccines approved for emergency use and increasing distribution, the country continued to establish vaccination records.
On Saturday, according to Covid-19 White House consultant Andy Slavitt, the US administered more than 4 million vaccines, exceeding the country’s average in the previous week 3 million shots a day for the first time.
NEW: 4.1 million vaccines reported today.
From 3.5 million last Saturday.
– Andy Slavitt (@ aslavitt46) April 3, 2021
In addition, more than 100 million people in the U.S. have already received at least one dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, Ryan Struyk of CNN tweeted Friday. On Saturday, according to Struyk, this means that 2 out of 5 North American adults received at least one dose.
There was also positive news about the effectiveness of several Covid-19 vaccines already authorized for use in the United States.
A new study last week confirmed that the Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna vaccines provide substantial protection against Covid-19 in real-world conditions, even after just a single injection.
According to the study, both vaccines were about 80 percent effective after the first doses and totally 90 percent effective after two doses.
The Wall Street Journal also reported on Thursday that the Pfizer vaccine “remains highly effective six months after its second dose, an indication that the protection may last for an even longer period.”
Still, the director of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, is asking for caution, despite the good news.
“We have a lot to expect, so many promises and potential from where we are and so many reasons to hope, but now I’m scared,” she said last week, warning that Covid-19 cases in the United States have started to rise again.
According to coronavirus data tracked by the New York Times, cases have increased by 19% in the United States in the past two weeks; the seven-day continuous average is almost 65,200 cases per day on Saturday.
“We are almost there, but not yet,” said Walensky. “And so I’m asking you to wait a little longer, to get vaccinated when you can, so that all the people we all love are still here when this pandemic is over.”