The US delivery of the ‘one-shot’ Johnson and Johnson vaccine will drop by 85% next week, in a setback for the government’s vaccination campaign.
According to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, the Biden administration has allocated only 700,000 Y&J doses to states for the week beginning April 12.
The decline comes after J&J reported that a group of its Covid-19 vaccines developed in Baltimore did not have the quality standards and could not be used – as Anthony Fauci warned that the US has a new coronavirus surge.
The distribution of the J&J vaccine – which requires only one dose, in contrast to the two-stroke vaccines Moderna and Pfizer vaccines that have also been authorized in the USA – has been uneven since its introduction.
The government allocated 2.8 million doses to states in early March, only to drop to 493,000 next week, but the drop to April 12 is the steepest yet.
The slowdown comes after workers at the coronavirus screening plant for J&J and AstraZeneca accidentally pooled the ingredients of the vaccines a few weeks ago, reports the New York Times.
It is unclear whether the mixture is the reason for the drop in J&J doses, and a spokesman for J&J told the Wall Street Journal that the company still aims to deliver 100 million doses by the middle of the year. to deliver the US, most of which by the end of May. The federal government has agreed 200 million doses with J&J.
On Thursday, Fauci, the leading expert in infectious diseases in the US, told CNN the cases of coronavirus had dropped to a “disturbingly high level”. According to Johns Hopkins University, more than 61,000 new cases were reported on Wednesday.
“It’s almost a race between vaccinating people and the boom that wants to increase,” Fauci said.
Health experts have warned that the growing number of coronavirus cases in dozens of US states is likely due to the spread of virus variants. Michigan has recorded the worst increase in infections in the past two weeks, at a rate not seen since early December.
The Associated Press reported Tuesday that nearly half of the new U.S. virus infections are in just five states, with New York, Michigan, Florida, Pennsylvania and New Jersey responsible for nearly 197,500 new cases in the latest seven-day period.
Despite the recent number of infections in Michigan over the past two weeks, Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of the state, has stopped ordering restrictions but asking for voluntary compliance. She blames the increase in viruses due to fatigue in pandemic, which moves people more, as well as more contagious variants.
This week, Joe Biden said that half of all American adults are on track to receive at least one Covid-19 vaccine by this weekend. The president has set a goal of delivering 200 million vaccinations by April 30 – his first 100 days in office.
According to the CDC, one in four American adults has now been completely vaccinated against the virus.