Johnson & Johnson will take over the factory where millions of doses of COVID-19 vaccine have been damaged

Washington. JJohnson & Johnson will be responsible for overseeing a factory of manufacturer Emergent BioSolutions, where approximately 15 million doses of US pharmaceutical vaccine against covid-19 were damaged during its production.

This was announced on Sunday by The New York Times, indicating that it is an “extraordinary measure” of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), after it was revealed that in the unit located in Baltimore (Maryland) former mixed ingredients of Johnson & Johnson vaccines and AstraZeneca pharmaceuticals.

The decision also stipulates that the laboratory will no longer produce the AstraZeneca vaccine, which has not yet received emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for distribution in the United States.

In a statement, Johnson & Johnson said on Saturday that it assumes “full responsibility for the manufacture of the drug for its covid-19 vaccine at the Emergent BioSolutions Inc. facility.” Bayview ”.

“The company adds leaders dedicated to operations and quality and significantly increases the number of staff in manufacturing operations, quality and techniques to work with the company’s specialists who are already in Emergent,” the statement said, without specifying more details.

The pharmaceutical company based in New Brunswick (New Jersey) pointed out that the vaccine doses distributed so far “met the company’s strict standards and regulations” and predicted that by the end of May it would deliver “approximately 100 million individual doses. “To the United States government.

“The company continues to work closely with the US Food and Drug Administration to secure the Emergency Use Authorization (US) for the Emergent Bayview facility,” he added.

Already last Wednesday, the American company reported that it had identified a batch “that did not meet the quality standards in Emergent Biosolutions” and clarified that “it never went to the filling and finishing stages” of its manufacturing process.

According to the note, the plant is not yet authorized to manufacture the drug for its vaccine.

For its part, the New York newspaper assured that the FDA did not deliver any of the Johnson & Johnson doses manufactured by Emergent for distribution and estimated that it would take several weeks for the factory to receive authorization to distribute any of the doses it had. product. ..

The Emergent plant, the newspaper said, received $ 628 million in June last year as part of a Donald Trump administration-led initiative to develop coronavirus vaccines.

This feature was contracted by Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, the version added.

The United States has 30,668,826 confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus and 554,779 deaths from covid-19 disease.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 104.2 million people (31.4% of the population) have received at least one dose of vaccine, of which 59.8 million (18%) are already fully inoculated.