US to distribute four million J&J vaccines
WASHINGTON: Four million doses of the latest Covid-19 vaccine to get US approval will be delivered across the country as early as today, a senior administration official said.
The United States on Saturday authorised Johnson & Johnson’s Covid vaccine for emergency use, boosting President Joe Biden’s plan to battle the outbreak that has killed more than 500,000 Americans.
The single-shot vaccine – the third type to be authorised – is highly effective in preventing severe Covid-19, including against newer variants, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said before giving it a green light.
“Starting tonight, 3.9 million doses of J&J will be distributed across all channels – states, tribes, territories, and pharmacies and community health centres. Those J&J doses will be delivered as early as this Tuesday morning,” the administration official said on Sunday on a call with reporters.
“That’s the entirety of J&J’s current inventory,” the official added.
“J&J expects to deliver approximately 16 million additional doses by the end of March. “So that’s a cumulative 20 million.”
The J&J vaccine is the third to be greenlighted in the United States after Pfizer’s and Moderna’s were provisionally approved in December.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US infectious disease official, said on Sunday he was encouraging Americans to accept any of the three available Covid-19 vaccines, including the newly approved Johnson & Johnson shot.
“All three of them are really quite good, and people should take the one that’s most available to them. If you go to a place and you have J&J, and that’s the one that’s available now, I would take it,” Fauci said on NBC’s Meet the Press.
Both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines showed higher efficacy rates in trials that used two doses versus J&J’s single-shot vaccine.
However, Fauci and other experts say direct comparison is difficult because the trials had different goals and J&J’s was conducted while more contagious new variants of the virus were circulating.