(Reuters) – The U.S. Food and Drug Administration said on Friday it had found four batches of AstraZeneca Plc’s COVID-19 vaccine manufactured at the troubled Emergent BioSolutions facility that were fit to be shipped outside the United States.
The health agency said it does not, however, expect to make any more decisions on the remaining lots of the vaccine manufactured at Emergent’s Baltimore facility.
Last year, the FDA halted operations at the plant, which was producing vaccines for AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson, following a discovery that one vaccine was contaminated with material used in the other.
There have been concerns over the shelf life of AstraZeneca’s vaccines reaching the world’s poorest nations for distribution, Reuters reported on Wednesday.
Many lots were reaching with only a few months, and sometimes weeks, before their use-by date, making the vaccination process overly chaotic. Some countries have had to destroy expired doses, including Nigeria which dumped up to 1 million AstraZeneca vaccines in November.
In 2020, AstraZeneca picked Emergent to help produce 300 million doses of the British drugmaker’s potential COVID-19 vaccine, which is still not authorized for use in the United States.
(Reporting by Dania Nadeem in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)
