Alex Gorsky, President and CEO of Johnson & Johnson, is celebrating the 75th anniversary of his company’s listing on the New York Stock Exchange on September 17, 2019.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
People may need to be vaccinated against Covid-19 annually, as well as seasonal flu vaccines, over the next few years, Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky told CNBC on Tuesday.
“Unfortunately, like [the virus] spread can also mutate, “he told CNBC’s Meg Tirrell during a Healthy Returns Spotlight event.” Every time it mutates, it’s almost like another click of the dial to tell you where we can see another variant, another mutation that can impact its ability to defend itself from antibodies or have a different type of response not not just a therapeutic vaccine, but also a vaccine. “
Public health officials and experts in infectious diseases have said that Covid-19 is highly likely to become an endemic disease, meaning that it is present in communities at all times, albeit probably at lower levels. that now. Health officials will need to continuously monitor new variants of the virus so that scientists can produce vaccines to fight them, medical experts say.
Gorsky’s comment came after J&J said he was applying for an emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for his coronavirus vaccine. Unlike Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, which require two doses administered three to four weeks apart, J&J vaccines require only one dose, facilitating logistics for healthcare providers.
U.S. officials and Wall Street analysts are eagerly anticipating the release of the J&J vaccine, which could happen as early as this month. President Joe Biden is trying to pick up the pace of vaccinations in the U.S. and experts say his administration will need a lot of drugs and vaccines to defeat the virus, which has killed more than 450,000 Americans in the past year, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
The Department of Health and Human Services announced in August that it had reached an agreement with Janssen, J & J’s pharmaceutical subsidiary, worth about $ 1 billion for every 100 million doses of its vaccine. The agreement gives the federal government the option to order an additional 200 million doses, according to the announcement.
Gorsky told CNBC that the company’s first priority is to work with the FDA to obtain U.S. approval. He said J&J is working at full speed on vaccine manufacturing, adding that the company is “extremely confident” that it will meet its goal of delivering 100 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine to the United States by the end of June.
“We will meet our commitments and at the same time do everything we can to accelerate production safely and effectively,” he said, adding that people “expect a lot” that they can get a single prey against the virus.
J&J is also continuing to work on a two-dose coronavirus vaccine, he said. The company expects the two-shot vaccine data to come from clinical trials during the second half of 2021, he said.