Up to 4m doses of new vaccine in frame for US
The administration of US President Joe Biden is planning to get up to 4 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine from Johnson & Johnson into communities as early as next week.
The distribution plans are being drawn up as the vaccine awaits an expected approval by the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA on Wednesday released documents showing the one-shot vaccine to be effective and safe, and regulators said there were no identified safety issues that would prevent an approval.
The US drugmaker said its vaccine showed 86 percent efficacy against severe forms of COVID-19 in the US, and 82 percent against severe disease in South Africa, where a highly contagious variant emerged in the fall and is now driving most cases.
The J&J vaccine is the first vaccine to show efficacy given as a single dose. It also doesn’t need to be kept frozen when being shipped, as do the vaccines developed by Moderna and the partnership of Pfizer and BioNTech.
Both of those advantages could have a big impact when it comes to vaccinating as many people as possible to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
On Friday, the FDA will convene a panel of independent experts to debate and vote on whether to recommend J&J’s vaccine for regulatory approval. Experts expect the committee to approve the shot in the following days.
White House COVID-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients told reporters on Wednesday that if the vaccine is authorized by the FDA, “we are ready to roll out this vaccine without delay”.
A number of 3 million to 4 million doses has been floated by the White House, and this represents an increase over what officials told governors on Tuesday, and likely reflects that J&J told Congress it will have 4 million doses ready to ship immediately upon authorization.
The pharmaceutical company said it aims to deliver 20 million doses by the end of March, and 100 million doses by the end of June.
‘Accelerate the pace’
Zients said the administration is working with the company to “accelerate the pace and time frame” for the full 100 million doses. The US government agreed in August to pay $1 billion for those doses, and the healthcare giant has pledged not to sell doses for a profit during the pandemic.
The White House has said it was planning to send the supplies to the states, pharmacies and community health centers.
Moderna is set to launch a clinical trial of a new vaccine designed to combat a variant of the virus, the company announced on Wednesday. It said it has produced enough of its variant-specific candidate vaccine, called mRNA-1273.351, to begin testing it in people.
The company said that “out of an abundance of caution”, it has begun pursuing two possible strategies against the variant: giving people a booster dose of the original vaccine to increase antibody levels, and developing two variant-specific vaccines, which could be given instead of the original one.