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April 8 (Reuters) - The U.S. government will allot nearly
85% less Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccines to states
next week, data from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) showed.
Only 785,500 J&J doses will be allocated, compared to 4.95
million doses this week. The U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services (HHS) and J&J did not immediately respond to requests,
made outside regular hours, for comment on the drop in numbers.
A New York Times report last week said that workers at an
Emergent BioSolutions facility in Baltimore, which
produced both AstraZeneca Plc and J&J doses, mixed up
ingredients of the two vaccines, ruining 15 million J&J doses.
However, the Baltimore facility has not yet been authorized
by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and a federal health
official told Reuters last week that none of the vaccine doses
from the plant have been used in vaccination efforts so far.
J&J has reiterated that it expected to deliver 100 million
doses to the government by the end of May.
According to the CDC data, California is the main recipient
of the J&J vaccine, followed by Texas and Florida. The vaccine
allocation for California is down by about 88%, with the state
set to receive only a maximum of 67,600 doses next week.
A California health official told Reuters that the number
will be down further in the week starting April 18, with only
22,400 doses of the J&J vaccine allocated to the state.
U.S. President Joe Biden on Tuesday moved up the COVID-19
vaccine eligibility target for all American adults to April 19.
(Reporting by Shubham Kalia and Aakriti Bhalla in Bengaluru;
Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore)
