COVID-19

Johnson & Johnson Announces Plan to Pause Vaccine Production to Focus on More Profitable, Non-Covid Vax

Published

1 year ago

February 8, 2022

The only Johnson & Johnson facility that is currently making the single-shot coronavirus vaccine announced it has halted production, at least temporarily. Based in the Netherlands, the plant will be focusing on a more profitable vaccine “aimed at a non-Covid virus” people familiar with the situation told the New York Times.

One source said the halt could reduce the supply of the vaccine by hundreds of millions of doses. CNBC reports that while it is unclear whether vaccine supplies have been affected by the decision, the J&J Leiden plant anticipates restarting production for the vaccination in March.

J&J spokesman Jake Sargent told CNBC in a statement that the company is “focused on ensuring our vaccine is available where people are in need” and added “we currently have millions of doses of our Covid-19 vaccine in inventory.”

CNBC writes how polls signify Americans are skeptical towards the J&J vaccine, which has been the only one approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. However, last year the FDA recommended pausing the use for J&J because of reports of recipients developing rare blood clots.

The fact that it was the only vaccine where one dose was needed instead of two made it initially more intriguing for people to get the vaccine. It also made transport and distribution easier as one dose can be stored without a freezer.

China

National Institutes of Health renews ‘bat coronavirus’ research funding

Published

1 month ago

May 9, 2023

Sara Carter Staff

Have we not learned our lesson? The now infamous National Institutes of Health has renewed a grant to EcoHealth Alliance for research on the “risk of bat coronavirus spillover emergence.” The news is shocking to many due to multiple agencies of the U.S. government supporting the lab leak theory of Covid’s origin.

“Zoonotic coronaviruses (CoVs) represent a significant threat to global health, as demonstrated by the emergence of SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2,” a press release read. “Bats were identified as the wildlife reservoirs of SARS-CoV by EcoHealth Alliance, and since then, we have published hundreds of novel SARS-related CoV (SARSr-CoV) sequences from wildlife in China and across Southeast Asia.”

In order to “ease” concerns and some objections, the press release noted on-the-ground work under the auspices of this new grant will not be conducted in China. The study is specific to southern China, but the “renewed work will involve collaboration only between EcoHealth Alliance and the Duke-National University of Singapore Medical School.”

All “recombinant virus culture or infection experiments” will also be removed from the research process. The press release assured that the research would not be “gain of function,” which involves extracting viruses from animals and engineering them in a lab to make them more transmissible or dangerous to humans.

The Biden administration has been supportive. National Review reports:

In February, national-security council communications coordinator John Kirby said the Biden administration supports gain-of-function research despite the potential risks as long as that it is pursued in a safe and transparent manner.

“[The president] believes that [the research is] important to help prevent future pandemics, which means he understands that there has to be legitimate scientific research into . . . the potential sources of pandemics so that we understand [them] and so we can prevent them from happening,” Kirby said.

However, let’s not forget:

in February, FBI director Christopher Wray told Fox News that Covid likely escaped from a laboratory in China, issuing the first public opinion of the sort from the agency on the origins of the virus.

“The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan,” Wray said. “Here you are talking about a potential leak from a Chinese government-controlled lab.”