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A rarity in Europe, abundant in the USA: the Johnson & Johnson vaccine
Photo: Alessandra Tarantino / AP
Germany has little luck with the corona vaccine from Johnson & Johnson (J&J).
After the delayed delivery of the first batch of a good 250,000 doses, the pharmaceutical company will reduce the second batch planned for this week, according to SPIEGEL information.
"The second delivery will not have the originally forecast volume," writes the Federal Ministry of Health (BMG) from Jens Spahn (CDU) in response to a SPIEGEL inquiry.
According to a list by the BMG, which is available to SPIEGEL, 444,000 cans should actually arrive these days.
The Ministry cannot or does not want to say how many there will actually be.
They are in close contact with the manufacturer and cannot give any precise information at the moment, they say.
The manufacturer has not yet responded to a request from SPIEGEL.
There is plenty of J&J vaccine in the US
The delivery cut is a new setback for Germany's vaccination campaign - especially since, according to SPIEGEL calculations, AstraZeneca has also delivered hundreds of thousands less doses than promised in the past few weeks.
And it again raises the question: Does the US company Johnson & Johnson prefer the USA over the EU?
After all, the United States is not short of J&J vaccine.
According to CNN, there are more than nine million doses ready to resume the vaccination campaign after it had been stopped due to rare cases of sinus vein thrombosis.
And this despite the fact that 15 million cans had to be destroyed due to contamination in a plant in Baltimore and this factory was closed until further notice due to hygiene and safety deficiencies.
Vaccine substance is made in the EU
Johnson & Johnson's vaccine has been injected almost eight million times in the United States since early March.
In the EU, on the other hand, the first batch was only delivered last week - and the second delivery has now been shortened.
According to SPIEGEL research, the J&J vaccine administered in the USA is largely or most likely completely produced in the EU: at the subsidiary Janssen in Leiden.
Janssen has so far refused to provide any information on this matter despite repeated inquiries.
According to the plans of the federal government, the vaccine should become a mainstay of the German vaccination campaign.
It only needs to be injected once and can be stored for a long time at refrigerator temperatures.
A total of a good ten million cans should come to Germany by the end of June, according to the list of Spahn's ministry.
Only Biontech is more important in the next few weeks.
The Ministry of Health wrote that despite the current cut, J&J will keep the delivery promise for ten million doses in the second quarter: "The vaccination doses will be inoculated in doctors' offices from May."
400,000 cans less AstraZeneca
According to SPIEGEL calculations, AstraZeneca also delivered less vaccine to Germany than promised.
According to the Ministry of Health's official vaccination dashboard, nothing arrived in the first week after Easter - and then only 417,600 doses.
However, 249,600 and 568,000 units were planned.
This means that Germany is short of 400,000 cans.
AstraZeneca has long been suspected by the EU of preferring the UK.
The manufacturer denies this. The EU Commission filed a lawsuit against AstraZeneca this Monday for lack of deliveries.
Upon request, Spahn's ministry confirmed that "AstraZeneca had already made several adjustments in April in the 2nd quarter": "A large delivery in the last week of April should compensate for these short deliveries."
General practitioners should take over
Accordingly, Germany would have to be flooded with AstraZeneca (AZ) these days: specifically with a batch of more than 2.5 million cans.
Because according to the original delivery forecast of the BMG, which was made before the cuts, over 2.1 million cans should come this week.
Plus the 400,000 cans of compensation.
The family doctors would then have a lot to do.
According to the BMG, a total of only 650,000 doses of AstraZeneca should be injected in the German vaccination centers by the beginning of June.
The remainder of the 2.5 million doses and all other upcoming deliveries of the vaccine would then have to be administered to their patients by doctors - if possible to people over 60.
On top of that, there would be an average of more than a million cans of Johnson & Johnson per week.
