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| - US President Joe Biden plans to announce an arrangement for pharma giant Merck to produce Johnson & Johnson's single-dose Covid-19 vaccine to boost supply, a senior Biden administration told AFP Tuesday. The official confirmed a Washington Post report on the unusual agreement, which is designed to significantly boost vaccine supply as the Biden administration seeks to tame a coronavirus outbreak that has claimed more than 500,000 American lives. The J&J vaccine is the third to receive US regulatory approval for emergency use, but the first that requires a single shot as opposed to two jabs. Merck will dedicate two facilities in the United States to the J&J vaccine build-out, one to manufacture the vaccine and the other to conclude the production process by putting the substance in vials and packing it for shipment, the Post reported. Neither Merck nor J&J immediately responded to a request for comment. The Food and Drug Administration's greenlighting of the J&J vaccine follows December provisional approvals of those by Pfizer and Moderna. The J&J shot appears less protective than Pfizer and Moderna's regimes, which both have an efficacy of around 95 percent against all forms of Covid-19 from the classic coronavirus strain. All three have been shown to fully protect against hospitalizations and death, however. J&J has said it aims to deliver 20 million doses by the end of March, with 100 million by June -- though the US is pushing to expedite that timeline. Prior to approval of the vaccine, White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Jeff Zients had said the federal government aimed to distribute three to four million doses this week. A major vaccine producer in its own right, Merck had begun work on its own coronavirus vaccines, but abandoned those efforts in January, saying its candidates produced immune responses that were "inferior" to successful Covid-19 vaccines. jmb/hs
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