A bottleneck in the vaccine chain

Prosenjit Datta points to a possible crisis as the government moves to improve supplies of Covid vaccines: inadequate testing facilities to handle those volumes

In India, the brouhaha surrounding Baltimore-based Emergent BioSolutions has garnered only passing attention. The company was one of the Trump administration’s favourite vaccine contract manufacturers. In 2020, the US government had given Emergent $626 million to stockpile vaccines for a possible Anthrax attack. It also got contracts to manufacture the Johnson & Johnson (J&J) and AstraZeneca vaccines.

In April this year, news broke that the US government had to destroy millions of doses of J&J vaccines produced by Emergent. The US Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) during an inspection found that Emergent had contaminated the J&J drugs with AstraZeneca ingredients.

Though the