A manufacturing mistake at a Baltimore manufacturing plant on Wednesday, March 31 resulted in the contamination of 15 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine. This could cause delays in future shipments of this particular vaccine to the United States. How did this kind of mistake happen?
Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine: Wrong recipe
Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 Vaccine Delayed Due to Having The Wrong Ingredient.
CBS Boston reports that workers at Emergent, the Baltimore facility that manufactures Johnson & Johnson's COVID -19 vaccine, mixed some of the ingredients up and ruined as many as 15 million doses of vaccine, causing the FDA to delay the plant's approval.
Johnson & Johnson reported that the facility's quality control had found one batch of the drug substance that was not up to standard.
The batch in question was part of a quality check and a test run, and the FDA has not yet authorized the site to manufacture the drug supply for the vaccine.
The company's email stated that this batch was never advanced to the filling and finishing stages of manufacturing.
The FDA approved J&J's single-dose COVID -19 vaccine late in February. However, the company had struggled to ramp up production and had not met earlier production timelines laid out in its contract with the federal government.
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Will The Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine be delayed
Johnson & Johnson's Covid-19 Vaccine Delayed Due to Having The Wrong Ingredient.
According to TheVerge, there have been no problems with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses that have already been distributed - those made in the Netherlands. Yet tens of millions of the shots were to be shipped out of this Baltimore plant by April.
Emergent BioSolutions, the company that runs the manufacturing plant, received $628 million last year from the Trump administration to expand its vaccine manufacturing capabilities.
The plant had not yet received approval from the Food and Drug Administration to manufacture its Johnson & Johnson vaccines, and this enormous error was attributed to human error.
It is unclear whether this setback will impact the availability of the vaccine over the next few weeks.
Pfizer / BioNTech and Moderna are still scheduled to meet their vaccination commitments in the United States, ensuring the country has enough shots to meet the Biden administration's target of having shots available for every adult by the end of May.
The limited availability of Johnson & Johnson vaccines might undermine efforts to vaccinate enough people for herd immunity.
Those who refuse vaccination against COVID-19 and claim they will wait and see are much more likely to accept the Johnson & Johnson vaccine than the Pfizer/BioNTech or Moderna vaccine since they only require one dose and are manufactured using a more familiar technique.
Many people might be reluctant to get vaccinated if all they have available is the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna shots.
In the United States, 30 percent of the population has received the COVID-19 vaccination at least once.
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This article is owned by Tech Times
Written by Lionell Moore
