Maine will still get full shipment of J&J vaccines after batch failed quality check

Maine will still get its full scheduled shipment of Johnson & Johnson vaccines next week after a batch failed a quality check at a Baltimore factory.

The contamination at the Emergent BioSolutions factory in Baltimore has affected as many as 15 million doses, according to The New York Times.

But that won’t affect the expected shipment of 20,600 doses coming to Maine next week, according to Robert Long, a spokesperson for the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Long said that those Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses weren’t manufactured in the same factory, saying that the vaccine remains “safe and effective.”

Emergent BioSolutions is one of 10 companies with which Johnson & Johnson has partnered to ramp up vaccine production to meet its ambitious goal of providing 100 million vaccines to the U.S. by May’s end, according to the Associated Press. An undisclosed number of doses failed a quality check on Wednesday.

Emergent’s Baltimore factory wasn’t approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for vaccine manufacturing, and it has been repeatedly cited for poorly trained workers, cracked vials and mold, the Associated Press reported.

The Johnson & Johnson vaccine has been seen as a critical tool for gaining an upper hand against the coronavirus, because unlike other vaccines it requires only a single dose rather than an initial shot and a booster weeks later.