Johnson & Johnson has temporarily paused production of its COVID-19 vaccine at its manufacturing site in The Netherlands.
Novikov Aleksey
Johnson & Johnson has temporarily paused the production of its COVID-19 vaccine at its manufacturing site in The Netherlands. According to a New York Times report, the facility will focus on making a potentially more profitable vaccine targeting a different virus. There is concern that this shift might decrease the supply of the vaccine by hundreds of millions of doses. However, it’s not clear if the actual vaccine supplies have been affected by the decision.
J&J spokesman Jake Sargent told CNBC that it is “focused on ensuring our vaccine is available where people are in need,” and that it is meeting its obligations to international groups working to increase access to the vaccines. The company expects to restart COVID-19 vaccine production in March.
Sargent also said the company is still delivering batches of vaccine materials to locations that bottle and package them for delivery, saying, “We currently have millions of doses of our COVID-19 vaccine in inventory. We are proud of the work of our many industry partners and the collaborations we have developed to produce our COVID-19 vaccine.”
The J&J vaccine was earlier noted for only requiring a single dose, although studies since have suggested perhaps it should have been two doses like the other two vaccines, Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech, authorized in the U.S. With the rise of the Delta and then Omicron strains, and the authorization of booster shots, two doses of J&J were found to be 85% effective against Omicron hospitalization.
The vaccine was developed by J&J company Janssen Pharmaceutical Inc. It has been associated with extremely rare cases of blood clots and is generally viewed as less effective than the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots. However, because it does not require ultra-cold storage like the mRNA vaccines and only required a single shot, it was very important to Africa and low-income countries.
J&J pledged about 50 million vaccines in October 2021 to 40 countries via COVAX, a vaccine-sharing program co-led by Gavi, the World Health Organization and CEPI.
Dr. Ayoade Alakija, co-head of the African Union’s vaccine-delivery program, told The New York Times that this change in vaccine production was risky.
“This is not the time to be switching production lines of anything, when the lives of people across the developing world hang in the balance,” she said.
A J&J spokesman told The Hill, “We strive to improve human health and have worked tirelessly to forge partnerships and build a global manufacturing network across four continents to produce our COVID-19 vaccine. In addition, we expanded the capacity of our facility in Leiden (The Netherlands) in 2021, and the site continues to play a role in our vaccine manufacturing in 2022. Our manufacturing sites produce multiple products as we have an obligation to supply life-changing medicines to patients around the world and bring forward our innovative pipeline of new medicines and vaccines. We manage our production planning accordingly and are currently supplying from our extensive global network based on the demand for our vaccine and the needs of our patients and customers.”
J&J is reportedly planning to re-open three other vaccine factories to generate the COVID-19 vaccine, including a facility in Baltimore run by Emergent BioSolutions. In April, the site was under fire and production halted after a batch of ingredients from AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine were mixed up with the J&J vaccine. After it failed to meet U.S. Food and Drug Administration guidelines, the site was shut down and production moved to other locations.
