Saginaw Valley State University student Matt Montroy is vaccinated on campus, Saginaw, Michigan, April 7, 2021 (Madison Thomas)
The Biden Administration’s Coronavirus vaccination drive will be slowed by a production problem with the Johnson & Johnson doses.
The White House’s pandemic response coordinator Jeff Zients confirmed the issue on Friday with a Baltimore manufacturing plant where 13 million to 15 million doses were contaminated. He said supplies will be “extremely limited” until regulators approved the production process.
Deliveries of the Johnson & Johnson variant are expected to drop by 86% next week. Government officials say supplies of the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech versions could fill some of the gap.
But the Johnson & Johnson vaccine has the advantage of being a one-shot rather than two-shot treatment. States have planned to use it for college students and transient groups, or to offer it at mass vaccination sites and rural areas.
The Biden Administration met its target of 100 million vaccinations within 100 days, reaching the target on Day 58, and raised the goal to 200 million. President Joe Biden said earlier this week that all US adults will have access to an inoculation by April 19.
But shipments of Johnson & Johnson vaccine will drop next week in California from 572,700 to 67,600 doses, Texas from 392,100 to 46,300, Florida from 313,200 to 37,000, and Virginia from 253,400 to 27,900.
Federal officials had planned for weekly deliveries of more than 4 million Johnson & Johnson doses in April. That projection has been cut to 1 million, all from Dutch plants.
The issue has been exacerbated by a surge of the virus, with more contagious variants, in some areas. Last week 44% of new US cases were in five states: New York, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer said on Friday that she urged President Biden to increase vaccine allocations in the state.
But White House coordinator Zients said yesterday that the administration does not plan to shift additional vaccine doses to the hardest-hit states. Administration officials said Michigan had received but not allocated doses; Michigan’s Chief Medical Executive Joneigh Khaldun responded that doses are being stocked for use at a mass vaccination site, and that others are preserved because of a mix-up of first and second doses by some providers.
The US death toll reached 561,052 on Friday. Confirmed cases are 31,082,623.
