15M Johnson & Johnson Vaccines Tainted, Made In Baltimore: Report

BALTIMORE, MD — About 15 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine have been contaminated at a Baltimore production facility, according to the New York Times.

The Food and Drug Administration has halted distribution of the J&J vaccines out of Baltimore pending an investigation, according to the newspaper, which said the vaccines that have already been distributed nationwide are not impacted, as they were made in the Netherlands.

The J&J vaccine was given emergency use authorization Feb. 27 and was the third coronavirus vaccine in the nation that was given the green-light by the federal government. Both the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have also been approved for emergency use in the fight against COVID-19, and they require two doses.

Emergent BioSolutions, a biopharmaceutical company based in Gaithersburg, has committed to produce 100 million doses of the J&J vaccine by June and 1 billion doses by the end of the year.

"We continue to expect to deliver our COVID-19 vaccine at a rate of more than one billion doses by the end of 2021," according to a statement from J&J issued Wednesday, March 31.

About 1,000 employees at Emergent BioSolutions' two Baltimore facilities are working on the vaccine's production, WBAL reported.

Emergent BioSolutions is also manufacturing AstraZeneca, another COVID-19 vaccine candidate, and the problem at the Baltimore facility involved mixing up the ingredients, federal officials told the New York Times.

"This quality control process identified one batch of drug substance that did not meet quality standards at Emergent BioSolutions, a site not yet authorized to manufacture drug substance for our COVID-19 vaccine," Johnson & Johnson said in a statement. "This batch was never advanced to the filling and finishing stages of our manufacturing process."