Shipments of 15 MILLION doses of Johnson & Johnson's one dose Covid vaccine will be halted after ingredient mix-up at Baltimore plantDaily Mail/UK, Mar 31, 2021
Some 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's one-shot coronavirus vaccine have been ruined after employees at a Baltimore manufacturing plant accidentally swapped in an ingredient meant for a different vaccine into the J&J shot, the New York Times reported Wednesday.
The Emergent BioSolutions plant is also manufacturing doses for AstraZeneca, and apparently used an ingredient for the UK firm's vaccine in a batch of J&J's.
The gaff occurred two weeks ago and will delay tens of millions doses of J&J's shot slated to ship next month while the FDA investigates.
J&J blamed the mix-up on human error and says that 11 million doses that shipped this week were not affected.
White House officials told the Times that the J&J fiasco will not prevent the U.S. from reaching President Biden's goal of having enough COVID-19 vaccine doses in the national stockpile to inoculate every American adult by the end of May.
But the loss of 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's one-dose vaccine will be a major blow to the U.S. rollout in the coming weeks.
Worse yet, the affected plant was supposed to be responsible for next month's entire U.S. supply of J&J's vaccine.
The last batches came from a facility in the Netherlands.
Because Johnson & Johnson's vaccine is authorized by the FDA to provide protection against COVID-19 with a single dose, a delay in its shipments is an even larger dent in the U.S. vaccination campaign than the loss of doses made by another firm would have been.
Fifteen million doses of the J&J shot would have been enough to fully vaccinate 15 million Americans.
The same number of shot made by Moderna or Pfizer would only have been enough to fully vaccinate 7.5 million people.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-9424827/15-million-doses-J-J-vaccine-ruined-ingredient-mix-up.html
