LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s drug regulator has approved the use of Johnson & Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine, the Health Ministry reported on Friday, making it the fourth anti-disease injection available for use in the country.
The UK also cut its order for the single-dose vaccine, also known as J & J’s unit Janssen vaccine, due to problems with the company’s supply chain and reports of rare cases of thrombi.
The UK has supplied two-thirds of the population with a first dose of COVID-19 vaccines, and the government cited the “unprecedented scale and pace” of the rollout as the reason for the decision to reduce its order to 20 million doses from the original order of 30 million doses.
The J&J vaccine is already approved in the United States and the European Union, where reports of thrombi are being reviewed.
The injection uses viral vector technology similar to that of Oxford-AstraZeneca, with which similar thrombus problems have been reported.
The UK has advised that those under 40 be offered an alternative to the AstraZeneca injection, and the government said vaccine advisers at the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization (JCVI) would also advise on the use of the injection. by J&J.
The government said the injection would be available in the course of this year. J&J is reported to expect to miss its delivery targets for the European Union this quarter.
(Reporting by Alistair Smout; edited in Spanish by Flora Gómez and Javier Leira)
