CANBERRA, Australia (AP) – The Australian government said on Tuesday it had decided not to buy Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine and identified a second case of a blood clot rarely related to AstraZeneca’s shot.
The government had held talks with the New Jersey-based pharmaceutical giant, which had applied for provisional registration with the Australian regulator, Therapeutic Goods Administration.
But Health Minister Greg Hunt ruled out a J&J contract because his vaccine was similar to the AstraZeneca product, which Australia had already contracted for 53.8 million doses.
Hunt said the government was following the advice of the Australian scientific and technical advisory group.
“J&J is another vaccine against the viral virus and we have no advice to recommend, at this time, that the government buy any additional vaccine against the viral vector,” Hunt told reporters. “This is not a reflection, but simply an observation.”
Australia has been relatively successful in containing the spread of the virus, but criticism is mounting over the pace of its vaccination implementation.
Australia had planned to rely on Australian-made AstraZeneca to achieve the goal of delivering at least one dose of vaccine to all eligible adults in a population of 26 million by October.
But the government abandoned that target after last week it warned that Pfizer was now the preferred option for people under 50 because of a potential risk of rare blood clots related to AstraZeneca.
A Victorian man who received an AstraZeneca injection on March 22 had to be hospitalized with blood clots. A second case of a woman who was inoculated in the state of Western Australia and hospitalized in Darwin was reported on Tuesday, the regulator said in a statement.
With 700,000 doses of AstraZeneca injected into Australia since early March, both cases equate to a clotting frequency of 1 in 350,000, the regulator said. British authorities say the risk of these blood clots is 1 in 250,000 in that country.
The government has doubled its Pfizer order to 40 million doses and Hunt said the additional 20 million doses were expected to be delivered in the last three months of 2021.
“This would mean a significant sprint for those who had not been vaccinated at the time,” Hunt said, referring to the government’s hope of having the population inoculated this year.
Australia expected to administer 4 million doses of the two vaccines by the end of March, but had only injected 1.2 million doses on Monday.
An 80-year-old Australian man became the first COVID-19 death in Australia on Monday this year and the 910th since the pandemic began.
The man had lived in the Philippines, where he became infected. He tested positive in hotel quarantine as a returned traveler and died at a Brisbane hospital.