While the Biden administration has worked to ramp up supply of all three authorized vaccines, the Johnson & Johnson product has multiple advantages over the other two because it’s one dose instead of two and lasts in a refrigerator for three months as opposed to being frozen.
“At this point in time, I don’t want to commit to what’s going to happen over the course of the coming week. We’ll leave that to the company,” Andy Slavitt, the White House’s Covid-19 senior adviser, told reporters Monday.
Despite efforts by the federal government to compress production timelines, Johnson & Johnson only had four million doses ready to ship when it was authorized by the FDA at the end of February. An additional 1.2 million doses have gone out since, meaning the company must have another 14.8 million ready in the next week to meet its goal.
Administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to comment on internal discussions, said they aren’t willing to guarantee those millions will be ready within the next week. They’re hopeful, but not positive, because the delivery schedule has not accelerated in the way officials had hoped, one told CNN.
Though they have been frustrated privately, the Biden administration has been hesitant to publicly criticize Johnson & Johnson over delays. The government has worked closely with the company to speed up the process, including using the Defense Production Act to obtain materials and equipment and the President recently announced they had brokered a rare partnership between Johnson & Johnson and the pharmaceutical giant Merck & Co. to make more vaccines, though the results of that joint venture won’t be felt until later this year.
In February, Johnson & Johnson said it had been working to expand its own manufacturing capacity with third-party vaccine manufacturers.
One part of the manufacturing chain, Catalent in Bloomington, Indiana, that does what’s known as the fill/finish part of the manufacturing process is still waiting on the sign-off from the US Food and Drug Administration to ship its doses. That plant has had teams working around the clock to fill vials with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, so when it does get the green light, that should boost the number of available Johnson & Johnson vaccines immediately.
Catalent told CNN on Monday that it hopes to get the FDA sign-off sometime this week, and an administration official echoed that.
The official told CNN the reason Catalent has not received FDA authorization to release the doses for shipment is because Johnson & Johnson has often been slow to submit the appropriate paperwork and data, delaying the entire release process, which must follow strict protocol to obtain final clearance.
An administration official raised the possibility that Johnson & Johnson could miss its March deadline to reach 20 million coronavirus vaccines, only to reach it days later.
But, as officials and public health experts have noted, with the pandemic killing Americans daily, every day — and dose — counts.