CANBERRA, Australia (AP) – The Australian government said on Tuesday it had decided not to buy the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus single-dose vaccine and identified a second case of a blood clot that was rarely related to the AstraZeneca shot.
The government has been in talks with the New Jersey pharmaceutical giant, which has asked the Australian regulatory authority, the Therapeutic Goods Administration, for temporary registration.
But Health Minister Greg Hunt ruled out a J&J contract because his vaccine was similar to AstraZeneca, which Australia had already contracted for 53.8 million doses.
Hunt said the government is following the advice of the Australian Scientific and Technical Advisory Group.
“J&J is another viral vector vaccine, and we have no advice to recommend, at this time, that the government buy any additional viral vector vaccine,” Hunt told reporters. “This is not a reflection, but simply an observation.”
Australia has been relatively successful in limiting the spread of the virus, but criticism is mounting over the timing of its vaccination launch.
Australia had planned to rely on the Australian-made AstraZeneca to achieve the goal of providing at least one dose of vaccine to all eligible adults in a population of 26 million by October.
But the government dropped the target after announcing last week that Pfizer is now the preferred option for people under the age of 50 because of the potential risk of rare blood clots related to AstraZeneca.
A man from Victoria who received an AstraZeneca injection on March 22 had to be hospitalized with blood clots. A second case was reported on Tuesday with a woman who was inoculated in the western state of Australia and hospitalized in Darwin, the regulator said in a statement.
With 700,000 doses of AstraZeneca injected in Australia since early March, the two cases equate to a coagulation rate of 1 to 350,000, the regulator said. British authorities say the risk of such blood clots is 1 in 250,000 in that country.
The government has doubled its Pfizer order to 40 million doses, and Hunt said the delivery of the additional 20 million doses is expected in the last three months of 2021.
“That would be a significant sprint for those who hadn’t been vaccinated before,” Hunt said, referring to the government’s hope of having the population inoculated this year.
Australia hopes to deliver 4 million doses of the two vaccines by the end of March, but has injected just 1.2 million doses by Monday.
An 80-year-old Australian man became the first COVID-19 death in Australia on Monday this year and the 910th since the pandemic began.
The man had lived in the Philippines, where he became infected. He tested positive for hotel quarantine as a return passenger and died at a hospital in Brisbane.