Australia rules out adding J&J vaccine to inoculation plan

<p>CANBERRA, Australia &mdash; The Australian government said Tuesday it had decided against buying the single-dose Johnson &amp; Johnson coronavirus vaccine and identified a second case of a rare blood clot likely linked to the AstraZeneca shot.</p>
<p>The government had been in talks with the New Jersey-based pharmaceutical giant, which had asked the Australian regulator, Therapeutic Goods Administration, for provisional registration.</p>
<p>But Health Minister Greg Hunt ruled out a J&amp;J contract because its vaccine was similar to the AstraZeneca product, which Australia had already contracted for 53.8 million doses.</p>
<p>Hunt said the government was following the advice of Australia’s scientific and technical advisory group.</p>
<p>“J&amp;J is another viral vector vaccine and we have no advice recommending, at this point, that the government purchase any additional viral vector vaccine,” Hunt told reporters. "That’s not a reflection, that’s simply an observation.”</p>
<p>Australia has been relatively successful in containing the spread of the virus, but criticism is mounting over the pace of its vaccination rollout.</p>
<p>Australia had planned to rely on Australian-manufactured AstraZeneca to reach a target of delivering at least one dose of vaccine to all eligible adults among a population of 26 million by October.</p>
<p>But the government abandoned that target after it advised last week that Pfizer was now the preferred option for people under 50 years because of a potential risk of rare blood clots linked to AstraZeneca.</p>
<p>A man in Victoria state who received an AstraZeneca injection on March 22 had to be hospitalized with blood clots. A second case was reported Tuesday of a woman who was inoculated in Western Australia state and hospitalized in Darwin, regulator said in a statement.</p>
<p>With 700,000 AstraZeneca doses injected in Australia since early March, the two cases equate to a clotting frequency of 1-in-350,000, the regulator said. British authorities say the risk of such blood clots is 1-in-250,000 in that country.</p>
<p>The government has doubled its Pfizer order to 40 million doses and Hunt said delivery of the additional 20 million doses was expected in the last three months of 2021.</p>
<p>“That would mean a significant sprint for those that hadn’t been vaccinated by then,” Hunt said, referring to the government’s hope to have the population inoculated this year.</p>
<p>Australia had hoped to administer 4 million doses of the two vaccines by the end March, but had only injected 1.2 million doses by Monday.</p>
<p>An 80-year-old Australian man on Monday became the first COVID-19 fatality in Australia this year and the 910th since the pandemic began.</p>
<p>The man had been living in the Philippines where he became infected. He tested positive in hotel quarantine as a returned traveler and died in a Brisbane hospital.</p>