CANBERRA, Australia (AP) – The Australian government said on Tuesday that it had decided not to buy the single-dose Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine and had identified a second case of a rare blood clot likely to be on the AstraZeneca shot linked.
The government was in talks with the pharmaceutical giant in New Jersey, which has asked the Australian regulator, Therapeutic Goods Administration, for preliminary registration.
But Health Minister Greg Hunt has ruled out a J&J contract because the vaccine was similar to the AstraZeneca product, which Australia has already contracted for 53.8 million doses.
Hunt said the government was following the advice of Australia’s scientific and technical advisory group.
“J&J is another viral vector vaccine and we have no advice at this stage to recommend that the government buy any additional virus vaccine,” Hunt told reporters. “It’s not a reflection, but merely an observation.”
Australia has been relatively successful in curbing the spread of the virus, but criticism is growing about its vaccination rate.
Australia plans to rely on Australian-made AstraZeneca to deliver a target by October to deliver at least one dose of vaccine to all eligible adults under a population of 26 million.
But the government dropped the target after advising last week that Pfizer is now the preferred option for people under the age of 50 because of a possible risk of rare blood clots linked to AstraZeneca.
A man in the state of Victoria who received an AstraZeneca injection on March 22 had to be admitted to hospital with blood clots. A second case was reported on Tuesday of a woman who was vaccinated in the state of Western Australia and hospitalized in Darwin, the regulator said in a statement.
With 700,000 doses of AstraZeneca being injected into Australia since early March, the two cases equate to a coagulation frequency of 1 to 350,000, the regulator said. British authorities say the risk of such blood clots is 1-in-250,000 in that country.
The government has doubled its Pfizer order to 40 million doses, and Hunt said delivery of the additional 20 million doses is expected in the last three months of 2021.
“It would mean an important sprint for those who have not yet been vaccinated,” Hunt said. He refers to the government’s hopes of getting the population vaccinated this year.
Australia had hoped to administer 4 million doses of the two vaccines by the end of March, but only injected 1.2 million doses on Monday.
An 80-year-old Australian man became the first COVID-19 death in Australia on Monday and the 910th since the pandemic began.
The man lived in the Philippines where he became infected. He tested positive in hotel quarantine as a returnee and died at a hospital in Brisbane.