WILMINGTON, Del.— Johnson & Johnson’s JNJ -2.64% single-dose Covid-19 vaccine is expected to reach states and vaccination sites as early as Tuesday, the Biden administration said.
The Food and Drug Administration’s authorization of the vaccine would lead to an initial supply of nearly 4 million doses delivered as early as Tuesday morning, administration officials said Sunday. The administration said it expects about 20 million doses to be delivered by the end of March. Distribution will be uneven early on as the company increases production, it said, meaning the bulk of the additional 16 million doses will arrive later in the month.
“We’re getting these doses out the door as soon as they’re available to ensure vaccines get into arms as quickly as possible,” said a senior Biden administration official.
J&J has said it expects output will quickly increase, enabling it to deliver a total of 100 million doses for use in the U.S. by the end of June. The company said it has begun shipping the vaccine to the federal government, which is managing allocation and distribution.
Public-health advisers to President Biden have urged Americans to take the first available vaccine when it is their turn, not wait for the one they most prefer.
Anthony Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser on Covid-19, minimized concerns that studies showed the J&J shot is less effective than the Pfizer Inc. – BioNTech SE and Moderna Inc. vaccines earlier authorized by the FDA. Dr. Fauci said that the J&J vaccine guarded against hospitalizations and deaths, the two most serious outcomes, and that it hadn’t been compared head-to-head against the other two.
“All three of them are really quite good, and people should take the one that’s most available to them,” Dr. Fauci said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday morning.
“If I would go to a place where they had J&J, I would have no hesitancy whatsoever to take it,” he added.
Biden officials said the J&J vaccine would be allocated as the first two have, in proportion to a state, tribe or territory’s population.
The J&J vaccine, the first administered in a single dose, is expected to bolster a mass-vaccination campaign that is pushing to end the deadliest pandemic in more than a century.
As of Saturday afternoon, 48.4 million Americans—14.6% of the population—had received one or more doses of the two previously approved Covid-19 vaccines, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Mr. Biden has said that enough doses of vaccine would be available to vaccinate 300 million Americans by the end of July.
Write to Ken Thomas at [email protected]
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