COVID-19: Romania receives first batch of Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses

The first batch of 60,000 doses of the Johnson & Johnson COVID-19 vaccine arrived in Romania on Wednesday morning, April 14.

Romania officially started the vaccination campaign on December 27 and has so far used the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and AstraZeneca vaccines.

Health Secretary of State Andrei Baciu previously announced that the first Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses would arrive in Romania on April 15. He also said that this single-dose vaccine will be used by the family doctors who have joined the COVID-19 vaccination campaign, but will also to distributed to the mobile vaccination centers set to open later this month.

Valeriu Gheorghita, the coordinator of the national vaccination campaign, said on Tuesday, April 13, that the Johnson & Johnson doses will also be used to vaccinate inmates in local prisons.

“The single-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine will be distributed (e.n. to prisons) to facilitate vaccination, but other types of vaccines may be used as long as the cold chains and other necessary conditions are met,” Gheorghita said, according to Digi24.

The inmates will be vaccinated in the prisons’ dispensaries by medical staff from the system. Healthcare staff from outside the system may also be allowed to participate in the vaccination of inmates, but only in exceptional cases, Valeriu Gheorghita explained.

On Tuesday, the United States Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have recommended a pause in the use of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine as they are reviewing data involving six reported US cases of “a rare and severe type of blood clot in individuals” who received this vaccine.

Following this statement, Johnson & Johnson also announced in a press release that it has decided to “proactively delay the rollout of our vaccine in Europe and pause vaccinations in all Janssen COVID-19 vaccine clinical trials while we update guidance for investigators and participants.”

In this context, Valeriu Gheorghita said that Romania is waiting for clarifications from the European Medicines Agency regarding this vaccine and the link between it and post-immunization cases of blood clots. “We can delay the start of vaccinations with this type of vaccine if needed, we have the storage capacity, no one is forcing us to start as long as we do not have enough safety data,” he said, according to