Canada’s drug and vaccine regulator said on Friday that it was withholding the release of the country’s first shipment of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine to verify its safety and quality. Health Canada, the regulator, said on Tuesday that none of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, developed by the company’s Janssen subsidiary, had been made at an Emergent BioSolutions factory in Baltimore which had discarded millions of possibly contaminated doses of AstraZeneca’s coronavirus vaccine. But in a statement issued on Friday evening, it said that since then it has “learned that a drug substance produced at the Emergent site was used in the manufacturing of the initial Janssen vaccines.”The regulator said that it is now working with Janssen and the Food and Drug Administration in the United States to make sure that the vaccines meet Canada’s standards for “quality, safety and efficacy.”

Source: New York Times May 01, 2021 01:53 UTC