After the FDA canceled the authorization for the Johnson & Johnson vaccination on June 1, only three COVID-19 vaccines are accessible in the United States.
Regulators acted in response to a request by Janssen, the Johnson & Johnson unit that manufactures the vaccine.
“[Janssen] has informed the FDA that the last lots of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine purchased by the United States government have expired, that there is no demand for new lots of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine in the United States, and that Janssen Biotech, Inc does not intend to update the strain composition of this vaccine to address emerging variants,” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, wrote to Janssen executives in a letter.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the FDA provided emergency approval for vaccinations from four companies: Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax. Johnson & Johnson was approved in February 2021, providing Americans with an alternative to Moderna and Pfizer’s messenger RNA vaccines.
As those vaccinations have been proved to be ineffective at protecting against infection and serious disease, the makers have modified the composition in an attempt to regain some of their potency. But Janssen elected not to, possibly because US officials curtailed the vaccine’s availability in 2022 after discovering that it causes a potentially fatal combination of blood clotting and low platelet counts, a disease known as thrombosis with thrombocytopenia syndrome (TTS).
