J&J board member says 20 million doses of Covid vaccine to be delivered by end of March

Johnson & Johnson board member Dr Mark McClellan said the company expects 20 million doses to be administered by the end of March, with the United States at a not adding a safe and effective third vaccine to its arsenal.

“There will be a period of ramp-up, so 4 million doses expected next week, increasing during the month of March with 20 million doses delivered by the end of March”, said the former commissioner of the FDA in an interview Friday night on “News with Shepard Smith”. “So that’s 20 million people fully vaccinated because it’s just one dose for the vaccine.”

On Friday evening, a panel of Food and Drug Administration advisers voted unanimously to recommend Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine for emergency use authorization. The FDA will decide on Saturday to approve the vaccine. A recommendation from advisers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would activate three to four million doses to be shipped next week.

McClellan told “The News with Shepard Smith” that the addition of the J&J vaccine would be a big step forward for the United States to fight the coronavirus pandemic and protect millions of people from the virus.

“This comes on top of some increases in the supply of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, they expect almost 90 million, 100 million doses … it’s a two-dose vaccine, but all of that means we could reach as many as 100 million people or more have been vaccinated by the end of March here in the United States, ”said McClellan, a health policy expert at Duke University.

Across the country, average daily cases, hospitalizations and deaths have been declining for weeks, but Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Rochelle Walensky said recent declines may level off.

“We may be done with the virus, but it’s clear that the virus is not done with us,” Walensky said. “We cannot feel comfortable or give in to a false sense of security that the worst of the pandemic is behind us. Not now, not when mass vaccination is so near.”

The CDC director added that we may start to see the effects of the new, more contagious Covid variants spread across the country. McClellan agreed with Walensky and warned that “we should be concerned” with the new variants, but doubled the importance of vaccinations.

“The good news is that vaccines seem to offer very strong protection against the variants, the best way to contain the variants is for as many people as possible to get vaccinated as quickly as possible,” McClellan said.