Spain Prepares to Launch J&J's COVID-19 Vaccine

El PAIS in Spain reported on February 12, 201, Johnson & Johnson's Janssen COVID-19 vaccine candidate is set to be approved by the EU on March 8th, “if everything goes well,” according to Spanish Health Minister Carolina Darias.

If the EU gives it the green light, it could be approved a few days later by the European Medicines Agency. Under the existing EU deal, Spain would receive more than 40 million doses of the Janssen COVID-19 vaccine.

“You can’t compare rates of effectiveness of different vaccines,” says Alberto Borobia, the doctor coordinating the Janssen vaccine clinical trial at La Paz hospital in Madrid, Spain.

La Paz is one of eight Spanish hospitals participating in the ENSEMBLE 2 trial, testing the Janssen vaccine as a two-dose treatment. Borobia is confident the study will analyze the impact of the new SARS-CoV-2 virus variants, although this will depend on the incidence of the mutations in the population.

The last advantage of the Janssen Ad26.COV2-S vaccine, at least for Spain, is that most of the doses will be made by the Catalan pharmaceutical company Reig Jofre.

On December 15, 2020, Reig Jofre announced it had reached an agreement with the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson to execute the technology transfer to manufacture its investigational COVID-19 vaccine candidate, Ad26.COV2-S.