Or not! But if we’re not going to use them, we should send them to another country like Canada or Mexico or Australia or the UK or EU, all of which have approved it and administered millions of doses.
Sitting on 10s of millions of vaccines during a pandemic is inexcusable.
Exactly zero of the J&J doses from that facility have been given to Americans. 15M J&J doses were discarded because they were contaminated with AZ ingredients. Tens of millions more are currently in quarantine awaiting other evaluations & may never be used. The facility has halted production & there are some hints it may not restart.
Some of the AZ already sent to Canada was from that plant, made under conditions that that can now only be verified imperfectly in retrospect, based on the kind of incomplete records the company has been in trouble for.
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/more-than-half-canadas-...
That is, the vaccine name has been slapped on a box that offers no guarantees of containing that content.
You need to be able to trust your medicine has been produced correctly, because there’s no real way to verify it as a consumer (or as a doctor, or a pharmacist, or really anywhere after the fact). As soon as that trust is lost, the whole thing falls apart.
You don’t take risks with medicine, because it’s already doing barely controlled, barely calculated shit to the body — that we only trust to do the job it says on the tin, because of the extensive and controlled tests. If those tests are no longer valid, because the medicine involved has qualities unknown (due to improper construction), anything goes.
I'm under the impression that the US has been sending its AZ doses to Canada and Mexico since mid-March: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/18/us-astrazeneca...
https://globalnews.ca/news/7728936/astrazeneca-vaccine-doses...
But: a bigger problem is that most came from the troubled Emergent Biosolutions plant, never FDA-certified, where all of its J&J production has been held back from US use:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/us/astrazeneca-covid-vacc...
If you look at the national vaccination rate, it looks like it's starting to level off. J&J makes up a small portion of vaccinations in the US, so especially seeing how appointments are easy to get, the rush appears to be over.
What is the reason? People don't bother? Are afraid? Organizational issues?
And decisions to invest in R&D and production facilities has consequences. Canada is finally getting on the ball to build a vaccine factory that will be ready in 2024. Maybe.
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/astrazeneca-still-plans-...
Likely not much demand but a positive FDA decision can boost confidence in other markets.
“but AstraZeneca is still planning to apply for emergency use authorization of its shot in the U.S.”
planning to = has not
Of course, AZ also lost its production capacity even if it was going to be approved, since it was dependent on the troubled Emergent facility which has been taken over but J&J and dedicated exclusively tonthe J&J vaccine, and has not located new production facilities.