(Reuters) – The US government will allocate nearly 85% fewer Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines to states next week, data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows.
Only 785,500 J&J doses will be assigned, compared to 4.95 million doses this week. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and J&J did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the drop in numbers outside of regular business hours.
A report from the New York Times last week said that workers at an Emergent BioSolutions facility in Baltimore, which produced both AstraZeneca Plc and J&J doses, scrambled the ingredients of the two vaccines, making 15 million J&J doses were screwed up.
However, the Baltimore facility has not yet been authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and a federal health official told Reuters last week that none of the plant’s vaccine doses have been used in vaccination efforts so far.
J&J has reiterated that it expected to deliver 100 million doses to the government by the end of May.
According to the CDC data, California is the major recipient of the J&J vaccine, followed by Texas and Florida. The vaccine allocation for California is down about 88%, and the state will only receive a maximum of 67,600 doses next week.
A California health official told Reuters the number will drop further in the week beginning April 18, with only 22,400 doses of the J&J vaccine assigned to the state.
US President Joe Biden on Tuesday raised the COVID-19 vaccine target for all American adults to April 19.
Reporting by Shubham Kalia and Aakriti Bhalla in Bengaluru; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore