Washington: President Joe Biden said Wednesday that his administration plans to order another 100 million Covid-19 vaccine doses from Johnson & Johnson.
The president made the announcement after a White House meeting with J&J CEO Alex Gorsky and Merck CEO Ken Frazier — one week after the two companies struck a deal for Merck to produce millions of doses of J&J’s vaccine.
The planned purchase would bring the country’s total vaccine order to 800 million doses split among three manufacturers. But J&J and Merck are unlikely to deliver the additional 100 million shots in time to speed the vaccination of American adults this spring.
The president also signaled that his planned Thursday primetime address would kick off a broader push to restore Americans’ sense of normalcy. “I’m going to talk about what comes next; I’m going to launch the next phase of the Covid response,” he said.
J&J has supplied roughly 4 million doses to the U.S. government since the single-dose vaccine was authorized by the FDA in February, but the company struggled with early production snags that diminished its initial supply. It enlisted Merck to help with production in an agreement announced by Biden last week as he promised most Americans could get shots by May, moving the timeline up by two months.
