The Food and Drug Administration late Saturday granted emergency use authorization to Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine, providing the United States with a long-anticipated tool that adds firepower and flexibility to the nation’s accelerating inoculation effort — but also presents new challenges.
Health authorities now have three effective vaccines, a singular scientific achievement that few would have predicted a year ago, when a pandemic emerged that has killed 2.5 million people worldwide, including more than 500,000 in the United States. It comes at a particularly fraught time, as Americans are whipsawed by encouraging developments, including sharp declines in nursing home deaths, and concerning news such as the emergence of potentially menacing variants.
With demand for vaccines outracing supply and officials scrambling to get much of the population vaccinated before variants spoil an improving picture, a third vaccine is “really good news,” said Eric Toner, senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The vaccine will not have a big effect initially on supply shortages. Only a few million doses will be shipped to states in the days immediately after authorization, though production will ramp up in coming weeks, with 20 million doses to be delivered by the end of March and 100 million total in the first half of the year, according to the company.
The new vaccine, which is for adults 18 and older, has clear practical and logistical advantages over the first two vaccines — it does not have to be kept frozen, and there is no need for a second round of appointments. That makes it a boon for rural areas and other hard-to-reach communities, and for distribution to community health centers and physician offices that might not have the freezers needed for the other vaccines, public health officials say.
With demand for vaccines outracing supply and officials scrambling to get much of the population vaccinated before variants spoil an improving picture, a third vaccine is “really good news,” said Eric Toner, senior scholar with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. The vaccine will not have a big effect initially on supply shortages. Only a few million doses will be shipped to states in the days immediately after authorization, though production will ramp up in coming weeks, with 20 million doses to be delivered by the end of March and 100 million total in the first half of the year, according to the company. ...
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