WSJ: Johnson & Johnson cuts production of coronavirus vaccines

The American company Johnson & Johnson has reduced the production of vaccines against coronavirus, as it faced a drop in demand, writes newspaper The Wall Street Journal (WSJ).

Johnson & Johnson has terminated agreements with companies that helped produce vaccines during the pandemic, Catalent Inc. and Sanofi SA. At the same time, there is a lawsuit with pharmaceutical Merck, which produced J&J vaccines. This partnership, created at the insistence of the US government, did not materialize, the newspaper writes. The co-production was announced in March 2021: Merck, which had not succeeded in developing its own vaccine, agreed to expand production for J&J at its two facilities in Durham in North Carolina and Pennsylvania, the authorities allocated more than $100 million for this purpose.

According to the WSJ interlocutors, the company, despite the modernization of the plant in Durham, did not produce commercial doses of the vaccine. Production was delayed due to difficulties in supplying vaccine ingredients and production components, as well as technical problems at the plant.

“The U.S. government stopped prioritizing J&J orders under the Defense Production Act, causing delays in the delivery of hard-to-find materials,” the newspaper said, citing a source.

It is noted that J&J filed a lawsuit in arbitration against Merck in October last year, followed by counterclaims.

The J&J vaccine has not been as popular as other COVID-19 vaccines, with approximately 400 million doses of the original Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine and nearly 250 million doses of Moderna administered in the US, while the number of J&J doses has reached approximately 19 million.

According to the paper, J&J originally expected vaccine sales for all of 2022 to be between $3 billion and $3.5 billion, but scrapped that forecast in April due to excess doses and uncertain demand. The company reported global vaccine sales of approximately $1.5 billion in the first nine months of 2022, up from $766 million a year earlier.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) approved the use of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine on March 11, 2021. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that it is administered as a single dose, and not in two stages, like other similar drugs.