
Johnson & Johnson is expected to meet its self-imposed goal of delivering 20 million Covid-19 vaccines by the end of March, White House Covid-19 response coordinator Jeff Zients said on Friday.
While the company has consistently said it was on track to meet the goal, Biden administration officials have expressed doubts.
“We've done a lot to help J&J. We're monitoring that very closely, and we anticipate a significant increase at the end of this month, which will enable them to hit at least 20 million doses,” Jeff Zients said at the White House Covid-19 Response Team briefing on Friday. Next week, the company should be able to deliver at least 11 million additional doses, which would take them to 20 million doses.
The J&J vaccine was authorized at the end of February, but the company struggled to ramp up production of its single-dose vaccine. It only had 4 million doses ready to ship when it was authorized; about 9 million have now shipped.
Zients said that J&J is still in its “earlier stages of manufacturing” compared to the other Covid-19 vaccines, but the White House expects that there will be a more “regular weekly cadence.”
Some more background: In February, the company announced it was working to expand production of the vaccine. The Biden administration has also worked closely with the company to speed up the process, including using the Defense Production Act to help the company obtain more materials and equipment to make the vaccine.
The President also helped broker a deal for rival Merck to make more of the vaccines for J&J in the coming months.
On Tuesday, Catalent, a fill-and-finish plant helping Johnson & Johnson produce the vaccine, said it received an OK from the US Food and Drug Administration to ship the vaccine. The company had been producing the vaccine for the past couple of months, but has not disclosed how many doses were ready.
The J&J vaccine has several advantages since it is just one dose and doesn’t require any special refrigeration, like the other two authorized vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna.