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About 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson were ruined due to confusion at a plant in Maryland, reports The New York Times.
About 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine have been ruined due to confusion at a U.S. production facility, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, delaying future shipments.
Workers at the Baltimore, Md., Plant run by Emergent BioSolutions “fused” the ingredients of the vaccine, the US newspaper reported. Federal officials attributed the error to “human error.”
The Times said the problem would not affect doses already administered in the United States, but would cause delays for tens of millions of doses of vaccine that were due to come from the Baltimore plant in the coming months. He did not specify the duration of these delays.
In a statement later Wednesday, the company said its “quality control process identified a batch of drug substance that did not meet quality standards” at the Emergent BioSolutions facility, but did not specify how many doses of his single-dose vaccine had been destroyed.
“This batch was never advanced to the filling and finishing stages of our manufacturing process,” said Johnson & Johnson, adding that the issue was resolved with Emergent BioSolutions and the Food & Drug Administration (FDA). the United States.
Vials with a sticker saying “COVID-19 / Coronavirus vaccine / injection only” and a medical syringe are seen in front of a Johnson & Johnson logo displayed in this illustration taken on October 31, 2020 [File: Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters]
The company also said it will deploy additional experts to the plant to oversee manufacturing as it moves towards emergency use clearance for the facility.
“In coordination with the US Department of Health and Human Services, these steps will allow us to safely deliver an additional 24 million doses of single-injection vaccine through April,” he said.
The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has helped speed up vaccine collection in the United States, which has intensified since President Joe Biden took office in January.
The United States has administered more than 150.2 million vaccines and more than 54 million people were fully vaccinated as of Wednesday, according to data from the Centers Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Almost 200 million doses have been delivered across the country.
Federal officials still expect to meet Biden’s goal of having enough vaccines to administer every American adult by May despite the Johnson & Johnson delay, the New York Times reported.
The United States – which has recorded more than 30 million cases of COVID-19 and more than 551,000 coronavirus-related deaths to date, according to a count from Johns Hopkins University – is experiencing a new wave of coronavirus infections.
CDC director Dr Rochelle Walensky, who said earlier this week that she felt “disaster looming” amid the rising number of cases, said Wednesday that COVID-19 pushed the death toll in the United States beyond 3.3 million last year, 16% more than in 2019.
President Joe Biden speaks as he visits a Pfizer manufacturing facility producing the COVID-19 vaccine in Kalamazoo, Michigan on February 19, 2021 [File: Tom Brenner/Reuters]
“The data should again serve as a catalyst for each of us to continue to do our part to reduce the cases and reduce the spread of COVID-19 and get people vaccinated as quickly as possible,” she said during the meeting. ‘a press briefing.
The coronavirus has hit communities of color particularly hard, Walensky said, with the life expectancy of non-Hispanic blacks dropping 2.7 years. It also declined by 1.9 years for Hispanics.
“Unfortunately, based on the current state of the pandemic, these impacts have remained in 2021 where we continue to see communities of color represent a disproportionate share of these deaths,” she said.
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