A Baltimore manufacturing plant ruined 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson's COVID-19 vaccine after human error,
The New York Times
reported Wednesday
.
The plant is operated by Emergent BioSolutions, which partnered with Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca to manufacture the two pharmaceutical companies' coronavirus vaccines.
All 15 million doses were ruined after
plant workers accidentally combined the wrong ingredients
several weeks ago.
The error will cause a delay in the shipment of Johnson & Johnson vaccines to the states, while the Food and Drug Administration (FDA, for its acronym in English) clarifies what happened.
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Johnson & Johnson issued a statement Wednesday in which it said the problem was identified and addressed with the plant in question, and shared with the FDA.
Employees of the Emergent Biosolutions laboratory in Baltimore, Maryland, which makes COVID-19 vaccines for pharmaceutical companies AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson.The Washington Post via Getty Images
"Our quality control process identified a batch of drugs that did not meet quality standards
at Emergent Biosolutions, a site that is not yet licensed to manufacture drugs for our COVID-19 vaccine," said the pharmacist.
"This batch never advanced to the filling and finishing stages of our manufacturing process," he added.
As the pharmaceutical company explained, the affected batch was never sent to the states, nor is there any danger with the doses that are currently being administered in clinics and pharmacies around the United States, since these were manufactured in the Netherlands.
The waste of these 15 million vaccines is not expected to affect President Joe Biden's goal of delivering 200 million doses by May 1, although it will do so to the supply chain, as all shipments were supposed to of this vaccine to the states by April, estimated at tens of millions of doses in the next month, would come from the Baltimore plant.
The mistake marks a major setback for Johnson & Johnson, as it is the first single-dose cornavirus vaccine and federal officials had expressed confidence that it would help expedite immunization in the United States.
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The FDA approved Johnson & Johnson's vaccine for emergency use in late February.
It was the third authorized in the United States after those of Pfizer and Moderna, which require two doses.
The vaccine was developed by Janssen, a Belgian pharmaceutical company that is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson.
Phase 3 trials, with 40,000 participants over the age of 18, indicated that it is
72% overall effective in preventing moderate to severe infections
, which means avoiding people needing to be hospitalized or dying from the coronavirus.
Prevention is even higher, 85%, in the case of serious infections.
Doses can be stored for up to three months at refrigerator temperatures, which makes handling easier than other inoculations, which must be kept frozen.
The United States has been administering about three million vaccines a day for the past few days.
As of Monday, 73% older people, and more than one in three adults, had received their first doses.
With information from The New York Times.
