J&J Covid-19 Vaccine to Start Arriving as Soon as Tuesday, U.S. Administration Says
March 01 2021 - 8:23AM
Dow Jones News
By Ken Thomas
WILMINGTON, Del. -- Johnson & Johnson's single-dose Covid-19
vaccine is expected to reach states and vaccination sites as early
as Tuesday, the Biden administration said.
The Food and Drug Administration's authorization of the vaccine
would lead to an initial supply of nearly 4 million doses delivered
as early as Tuesday morning, administration officials said Sunday.
The administration said it expects about 20 million doses to be
delivered by the end of March. Distribution will be uneven early on
as the company increases production, it said, meaning the bulk of
the additional 16 million doses will arrive later in the month.
"We're getting these doses out the door as soon as they're
available to ensure vaccines get into arms as quickly as possible,"
said a senior Biden administration official.
J&J has said it expects output will quickly increase,
enabling it to deliver a total of 100 million doses for use in the
U.S. by the end of June. The company said it has begun shipping the
vaccine to the federal government, which is managing allocation and
distribution.
Public-health advisers to President Biden have urged Americans
to take the first available vaccine when it is their turn, not wait
for the one they most prefer.
Anthony Fauci, President Biden's chief medical adviser on
Covid-19, minimized concerns that studies showed the J&J shot
is less effective than the Pfizer Inc.- BioNTech SE and Moderna
Inc. vaccines earlier authorized by the FDA. Dr. Fauci said that
the J&J vaccine guarded against hospitalizations and deaths,
the two most serious outcomes, and that it hadn't been compared
head-to-head against the other two.
"All three of them are really quite good, and people should take
the one that's most available to them," Dr. Fauci said on NBC's
"Meet the Press" Sunday morning.
"If I would go to a place where they had J&J, I would have
no hesitancy whatsoever to take it," he added.
Biden officials said the J&J vaccine would be allocated as
the first two have, in proportion to a state, tribe or territory's
population.
The J&J vaccine, the first administered in a single dose, is
expected to bolster a mass-vaccination campaign that is pushing to
end the deadliest pandemic in more than a century.
As of Saturday afternoon, 48.4 million Americans -- 14.6% of the
population -- had received one or more doses of the two previously
approved Covid-19 vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention.
Mr. Biden has said that enough doses of vaccine would be
available to vaccinate 300 million Americans by the end of
July.
Write to Ken Thomas at ken.thomas@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 01, 2021 08:08 ET (13:08 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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