Used syringes for the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine.
Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty ImagesThe federal government’s Covid-19 vaccine allocations to states next week will not include any doses of the Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.
The drying up of allocations comes after warnings from federal officials that there will be few new doses of the vaccine available until the U.S. Food and Drug Administration clears a troubled manufacturing plant operated by a Johnson & Johnson (ticker: JNJ) subcontractor, Emergent BioSolutions (EBS).
The shortfall of new doses comes days after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed 28 total cases of rare blood clots in patients who had received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine was once expected to serve as the workhorse of the global Covid-19 vaccination campaign. But the challenges it has faced so far in its rollout offer one more indication that the messenger RNA-based vaccines from Pfizer (PFE) and Moderna (MRNA) seem set to dominate the Covid-19 vaccine market.
That may not be significant for Johnson & Johnson’s bottom line, as the company has said it will sell the vaccine on a not-for-profit basis during the pandemic. But Moderna and Pfizer have pinned substantial commercial hopes to their vaccines, and analysts expect billions of dollars in sales in the coming years.
Johnson & Johnson shares were flat in premarket trading on Friday. Pfizer shares were up 0.1%, while shares of its partner BioNTech (BNTX) were up 2%, and shares of Moderna were up 1.3%.
Shares of Emergent BioSolutions, meanwhile, were down 1.2% in premarket trading, and 34.7% so far this year. Emergent’s Baltimore plant ruined millions of doses of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, and then was the subject of a highly critical report by FDA inspectors. Company leaders are testifying before Congress next week.
The CDC, which manages the allocation of Covid-19 vaccine doses, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Barron’s early Friday on the report.
Emergent referred questions to Johnson & Johnson. In a statement to Barron’‘s, Johnson & Johnson said: “We continue to partner closely with the U.S. government, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), along with other global health authorities, regarding the Emergent Bayview facility,” referring to the troubled Emergent BioSolutions plant.
In a May 12 statement, Emergent said it had already started making improvements in response to the FDA’s critical report. “We continue to have constructive, on-going dialogue with the FDA and Johnson & Johnson as we work on the path forward to release drug substance currently under evaluation and to resume production,” the company said at the time.
Weekly allocations of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine have been low for a while. While 4.9 million doses were sent the week of April 5, according to CDC data, only 700,000 doses were sent the week of April 12, and 765,000 the week of May 3. This past week, the allocation was just 600,000 doses.
That is in contrast to the roughly 7.7 million Moderna vaccine doses allocated this past week, and the 10.2 million Pfizer vaccine doses.
The allocation stoppage likely won’t immediately lead to shortfalls of the vaccine on a state level. According to the CDC, 19.9 million doses of the one-shot vaccine have been delivered so far, and only 9.4 have been administered.
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