CANBERRA, Australia (AP) – The Australian government said on Tuesday that it had decided not to purchase the Johnson & Johnson single-dose coronavirus vaccine and identified a second case of a rare blood clot likely related to the AstraZeneca injection.
The government was in talks with the New Jersey-based pharmaceutical giant, who had requested preliminary registration from the Australian regulator, Therapeutic Goods Administration.
But Health Secretary Greg Hunt ruled out a J&J contract because the vaccine was comparable to the AstraZeneca product, which Australia had already contracted for 53.8 million doses.
Hunt said the government was following the advice of Australia’s scientific and technical advisory group.
“J&J is another viral vector vaccine and we have no advice at this time to recommend that the government purchase an additional viral vector vaccine,” Hunt told reporters. “That’s not a reflection, it’s just an observation.”
Australia has been relatively successful in curbing the spread of the virus, but criticism is mounting over the pace of vaccination roll-out.
Australia planned to rely on Australia-manufactured AstraZeneca to deliver at least one dose of vaccine to all eligible adults in a population of 26 million by October.
But the government dropped that goal after announcing last week that Pfizer was now the preferred option for people under 50 due to a potential risk of rare blood clots linked to AstraZeneca.
A man in the state of Victoria who received an AstraZeneca injection on March 22 had to be hospitalized with blood clots. A second case was reported Tuesday of a woman vaccinated in the state of Western Australia and hospitalized in Darwin, the regulator said in a statement.
With 700,000 doses of AstraZeneca injected in Australia since the beginning of March, the two cases correspond to a coagulation frequency of 1 in 350,000, the regulator said. The UK authorities say the risk of such blood clots in that country is 1 in 250,000.
The government has doubled its Pfizer order to 40 million doses, and Hunt said delivery of the additional 20 million doses was expected in the last three months of 2021.
“That would represent a significant sprint for those who had not been vaccinated by then,” Hunt said, referring to the government’s hopes of getting the population vaccinated this year.
Australia had hoped to administer 4 million doses of the two vaccines by the end of March, but had injected just 1.2 million doses on Monday.
An 80-year-old Australian man became the first COVID-19 fatal victim in Australia this year on Monday and the 910th since the start of the pandemic.
The man lived in the Philippines where he became infected. He tested positive in hotel quarantine as a returned traveler and died in a hospital in Brisbane.