15 million doses of vaccine ruined at Johnson & Johnson plant in US

Employees of the American Johnson & Johnson plant in Baltimore, Maryland, made a mistake a few weeks ago when mixing the ingredients of the novel coronavirus vaccine, which led to the loss of 15 million doses of the drug, Report informs, citing The New York Times.

According to the newspaper, the incident happened due to a human error. Because of the incident, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is inspecting the plant. Moreover, it is noted that all batches of the company's vaccine that have already arrived at US medical institutions are safe since they were produced at Johnson & Johnson's facilities in the Netherlands. However, subsequent batches of the drug were planned to be sent from the Baltimore plant, which would lead to a delay in deliveries due to downtime over the FDA inspection.

The article reads that the American authorities have high hopes for the single-component vaccine Johnson & Johnson in accelerating the vaccination program in the country.

In turn, Johnson & Johnson confirmed the incident and assured that the defective batch of vaccines did not reach the final stage of production.

In a statement later on Wednesday, the company said its "quality control process identified one batch of drug substance that did not meet quality standards" at the Emergent BioSolutions facility but did not say how many doses of its single-dose vaccine were ruined.

"This batch was never advanced to the filling and finishing stages of our manufacturing process," Johnson & Johnson said, adding that the issue was addressed with Emergent BioSolutions and the US Food & Drug Administration (FDA).