Johnson & Johnson will take control of plant where millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccine were damaged

Washington. Johnson & Johnson will oversee a plant at manufacturer Emergent Biosolutions, where some 15 million doses of the US pharmaceutical vaccine against covid-19 were damaged during production.

This was announced this Sunday by The New York Times, stating that this is an “extraordinary measure” of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), after it was reported that in at the Baltimore, Maryland facility, ingredients from Johnson & Johnson vaccines and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals were mixed.

The decision also provides that the laboratory will no longer produce the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has not yet received emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for distribution in the United States.

In a statement, Johnson & Johnson said Saturday that it is taking “full responsibility for the manufacture of the drug substance for its covid-19 vaccine at the Bayview Emerging Biosolutions Inc. facility.”

“The company is adding leaders dedicated to operations and quality, and significantly increasing the number of manufacturing, quality and technical operations personnel to work with the company’s specialists who are already in Emergent,” the statement said. without specifying further details.

The New Brunswick-based pharmaceutical company pointed out that the doses of its vaccine distributed to date “have complied with the company’s strict quality and regulatory quality standards” and predicted that by the end of May will deliver “nearly 100 million individual doses” to the U.S. Government.

“The company continues to work closely with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to obtain authorization for emergency use (U.S.) of Emergent Bayview facilities,” he added.

Already last Wednesday, the American firm had reported that it identified a batch “that did not meet the quality standards in Emergent Biosolutions” and clarified that this “never went through the filling and finishing stages” of its process. manufacturing.

According to the note, the plant is not yet authorized to manufacture the drug for its vaccine.

For its part, the New York newspaper said that the FDA has not delivered for distribution any of the doses of Johnson & Johnson manufactured by Emergent, and estimated that it will take weeks for the plant to receive permission to distribute any of the doses that have occurred.

The Emergent plant, the newspaper noted, received $ 628 million in June last year as part of the initiative led by Donald Trump’s past administration to develop coronavirus vaccines.

This facility was contracted by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, the version has added.

The United States has 30,668,826 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and 554,779 deaths from covid-19 disease.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 104,200,000 people (31.4% of the population) have received at least one dose of the vaccine, of which 59,800,000 (18%) they are already completely inoculated.