World News
Dania Nadeem
Rebecca Spalding
Julie Steenhuysen
(Reuters) – The Biden administration is exploring all options to increase manufacturing of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, which is under regulatory review, and said on Friday that the currently expected starting dose levels were lower than expected.
The White House invoked the Defense Production Act to help Pfizer Inc increase production of the COVID-19 vaccine and that “all options” were on the table to produce more Johnson & Johnson vaccine, if authorized.
It will also use wartime powers to increase home testing of COVID-19 and make more surgical gloves in the United States, officials said at a news conference on Friday.
“As is the case with other vaccines, we have not found that the level of manufacture allows us to have as much vaccine as we think we need to get out of the gate,” said Andy Slavitt, senior adviser to the COVID-19 White House response team, referring to to the J&J vaccine.
J&J on Thursday applied for US emergency use authorization. She hopes to have some vaccine ready for distribution as soon as it is authorized, but did not say how much.
Emergent Biosolutions Chief Executive Robert Kramer said in an interview on Friday that the company is currently producing drugs in bulk for J&J “on a large scale”. Emergent is producing only vaccines in bulk, which are then placed in syringes or vials and packaged for shipment by another contractor.
Kramer said they were on track to make enough products for hundreds of millions of doses a year. It is not yet clear what the other supply bottlenecks may be. Kramer said his company had already benefited from the Defense Production Act under the Trump Administration, which helped the company get to the point where it is ready to go.
Under the authority of the Defense Production Act, the government will give priority ratings to two important components for Pfizer’s vaccine production – filling pumps and tangential flow filtering units, officials said.
“We told you that when we learned of a bottleneck in the necessary equipment, supplies or technology related to vaccine delivery, we would step in and help, and we were doing just that,” said Tim Manning, supply chain coordinator for COVID-19 Response.
The government will also invoke its powers under the Defense Production Act to increase home testing of COVID-19 with six unidentified manufacturers, with the aim of producing 61 million tests by the summer, Manning said.
It will also invoke its powers to increase the national supply of surgical gloves, which are made almost exclusively abroad.
Manning said the government will build factories for raw materials for surgical gloves and help build factories in the United States to make the gloves.
By the end of the year, he said, the United States would be able to produce a billion gloves a month.
Officials said that once the J&J vaccine is authorized, it would mean that millions more doses would be available to states. The vaccine is single-dose, unlike the two-dose vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna Inc, and can be stored in a refrigerator.
Officials hope that the ease of administration of the J&J vaccine means that states will be able to immunize residents more quickly.