J&J has only a few million Covid vaccine doses ready as it nears U.S. launch, Biden official says

Johnson & Johnson hasn’t manufactured a lot of doses of its single-shot Covid-19 vaccine ahead of its regulatory clearance expected later this month.

The administration has learned in the last couple of weeks that J&J will only have “a few million” doses ready when the vaccine is likely authorized by the Food and Drug Administration, Jeff Zients, President Joe Biden’s Covid czar, told reporters Wednesday during a White House news briefing on the pandemic. 

Federal and state health officials were expecting vaccine supply to rapidly increase after the emergency use authorization of J&J’s vaccine. The FDA has scheduled a meeting of its Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee on Feb. 26 to discuss the vaccine, and the U.S. could authorize the vaccine as early as the next day.

J&J currently has a deal with the U.S. government to supply 100 million doses of its vaccine by the end of June, Zients said. Assuming the vaccine is authorized, the Biden administration will work with J&J to ramp up supply as quickly as possible, he said, adding U.S. officials hope many of those doses will be available in the early months of its rollout.

“We’re doing everything we can working with the company to accelerate the delivery schedule,” he said.

The news comes as the Biden administration works to ramp up the supply of doses after states complained that demand for the shots was rapidly outpacing supply. Roughly 39.7 million out of some 331 million Americans have received at least their first dose of Pfizer’s or Moderna’s two-dose vaccines, according to data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And 15 million of those people have already gotten their second shot.

Biden announced Thursday that the U.S. had secured 100 million more doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and 100 million more of the Moderna vaccine, increasing the total U.S. supply to 600 million doses. Because the vaccines require two doses, a total of 600 million doses would be enough to inoculate 300 million Americans.

And a few days later on Tuesday, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced that the Biden administration was increasing the number of Covid-19 vaccine doses shipped to states weekly, sending out 13.5 million doses this week and doubling the number going to retail pharmacies.

This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.