Corona vaccine: Johnson & Johnson failure hits Germany hard

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Vial with corona vaccine from Johnson & Johnson: Failure would have to be compensated with twice the amount of other vaccines

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San Francisco Chronicle / Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images / Hearst Newspapers via Getty Images

Due to possible contamination in the US plant of the contract manufacturer Emergent, large quantities of the vaccine that has already been produced by Johnson & Johnson (J&J) must be destroyed by order of the FDA. According to the New York Times and CNN, around 60 million cans have been declared unusable and only ten million cans are released. In addition, the plant will remain closed for the time being.

This has serious consequences for Germany. "The deliveries from Johnson & Johnson largely depend on the approval of vaccines that have already been produced by the FDA in the USA," the Federal Ministry of Health told SPIEGEL at the beginning of June. "If the approval is given promptly, we can still count on larger deliveries." Since the FDA has now only released about a seventh of the batches examined, the deliveries to the Federal Republic are likely to be correspondingly thin.

According to plans by Health Minister Jens Spahn (CDU), the J&J vaccine should become the second most important pillar of the German vaccination campaign: with deliveries of 10.1 million doses in the current quarter. By the end of last week, however, only 1.7 million servings had arrived. The drug was administered to 1.25 million people. These failures are particularly serious because J&J is only injected once - and has to be compensated for by double the amount of other vaccines.

"A total failure of J&J would require almost nine million additional other vaccinations with just under 18 million doses by the end of July," said Sebastian Dullien, the scientific director of the Institute for Macroeconomics and Business Cycle Research (IMK) of the Hans Böckler Foundation, the SPIEGEL.

"This could delay the campaign for up to a month if it is not offset by other vaccines."

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A compensation is not in sight - on the contrary.

There are also bottlenecks in other vaccines.

• Biontech

  is expected to significantly reduce its deliveries again from the second week of July. The Federal Ministry of Health has not yet published any figures on this. But according to the French government, deliveries to France will fall back to May's levels from July 11th. For Germany it would mean that around 3.4 million cans of Comirnaty will be delivered per week. In June, on the other hand, an average of more than five million cans per week are planned.

• AstraZeneca

  has recently attracted attention again due to serious delivery cuts and delays. For example, the group should provide the federal government with more than 2.4 million doses of vaccine in the past week; in fact, only a quarter of it arrived. Overall, AstraZeneca should provide at least 12.4 million servings for Germany in the second quarter of 2021; so far less than 5.3 million have arrived. And so recently on average only about 56,000 people in this country were vaccinated with Vaxzevria. Three weeks ago there were more than twice as many.

• Curevac

  will not deliver a vaccine for months - if the vaccine comes at all.

  According to a report in "Mannheimer Morgen", Spahn is no longer planning the drug for the current vaccination campaign in view of massive problems and repeated delays in ongoing efficacy studies.

  His ministry has completely removed the Curevac vaccine from the delivery schedules published on the website for 2021.

• Moderna

  will only increase its deliveries slightly in July: from 622,000 to 733,000 cans per week.

  That is not even close to compensating for Johnson & Johnson failures.

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Angela Merkel disrupt the unsafe vaccine deliveries.

"We don't have a clear picture for the month of July," said the Chancellor on Thursday about the vaccine deliveries.

In addition, she is worried about the exponential growth of the particularly contagious Indian Delta variant in Great Britain.

So far, 48 percent of people in Germany have been vaccinated at least once and a good quarter have been completely immunized.

According to the Robert Koch Institute, the proportion of those who have been completely vaccinated and recovered must be at least 80 percent in order to largely forego corona measures.

If Johnson & Johnson should now largely fail, according to IMK director Dullien, 80 percent of the vaccinations or recovery could not be until the end of August - from the adults, mind you. In the case of children and adolescents, the proportion will be much lower. And by the fall, millions of doses of vaccine are likely to be needed for boosters.