Limited supply of J&J vaccines start to roll out

First shipments will exhaust 4 million dose supply until late March, as officials tout vaccine's "100% efficacy" at preventing death as reason to welcome third option against COVID-19.

A senior administration official said Sunday that 3.9 million doses of the newly authorized Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine will start reaching states on Tuesday. But that’s the full supply for now. Another 16 million doses will be delivered by the end of March, but the official said most of those will be “predominantly in the back half of the month.” The company is committed to supplying another 80 million doses between then and the end of June.

The FDA authorized the J&J vaccine for emergency use on Saturday, which was quickly followed by the CDC’s assent Sunday. Click here for my report on Friday’s FDA advisory panel review of the vaccine and its 22-0 vote to recommend its use.

J&J is ramping up manufacturing at a Baltimore factory that was built with federal government support.

Distribution of the J&J one-dose vaccines will be using the same formula used for the existing Pfizer and Moderna vaccines, apportioning the supply to each state based on its population. White House officials said they expected that all three vaccines will be available in every community, even though each vaccine has different storage requirements.

The J&J vaccine is the first to be studied while new, highly contagious variants have been detected, so its 72% efficacy in the United States and 66% across the three countries where the vaccine was studied suggests that it has some effect against the variants, such as ones prevalent in South Africa and Brazil.

CDC Director Dr. Rachelle Walensky and other top officials attribute the apparent stall in the downward trend of new cases to emerging variants. One official said Sunday that the B.1.526 strain, first detected in New York City in November, has been spreading rapidly and may be capable of eluding some of the protection afforded by the existing vaccines. Columbia University researchers published their findings on this strain on Thursday.