By Dan Murphy
As millions of Americans receive doses of COVID-19 Vaccines, and millions more await their shot, the US received its first bit of bad news regarding doses when Johnson & Johnson announced that it had to discard 15 million of its one shot doses.
One of J&J’s subcontractors, Emergent BioSolutions, discovered that its employees had contaminated a batch of vaccines at its Baltimore plant, resulting in the forced trashing of between 13-15 million doses. The facility is also closed, pending an FDA inspection.
Until the FDA clears the factory, another 62 million doses remain at the plant, and 15 million of those doses are ready to be shipped out, pending FDA approval.
NY Governor Andrew Cuomo said that J&J’s troubles means that “We will not be able to get as many shots into New Yorkers’ arms as we would like. As has been the case since the beginning of our vaccination effort, the X factor is supply, supply, supply.”
The Federal government had been planning on receiving 4 million J&J Vaccines per week, and while J&J used several other subcontractors to manufacture its vaccine, in NY and the tri-state area, the number of J&J Vaccines coming has plummeted by 80%.
The snafu could impact J&J’s agreement to provide 80 million doses in the US by the end of May. The company said that it still intends to meet that number and provide a total of 100 million vaccines by the end of June.
Even without the J&J vaccine, the U.S. Government has 200 million doses from Pfizer and Moderna coming by the end of May.
The fact that J&J’s vaccine was a one-shot, and that it didn’t require any extreme cooling storage gave health officials and educators hope that millions of college students could be vaccinated before the start of the fall 2021 semester.
Several upstate private colleges, including Cornell and Syracuse Universities, have announced that vaccines will be mandatory for students who wish to return this fall.
But the Chancellor of SUNY, Jim Malatras, announced that at this time, all students will not be required to vaccinated. Many students that stayed on campus this spring are being vaccinated before they leave for the summer, and the state and SUNY will review their policy before the August return date for SUNY students.
