Inside J&J’s efforts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine

Carl Zimmer of the New York Times took a deep dive into the Covid-19 vaccine efforts of Johnson & Johnson, which has nearly $1 billion in its arsenal dedicated to the project. The vaccine, being developed in collaboration with Harvard immunologist Dan Barouch, will soon be tested for safety in clinical trials in both Belgium and Boston. It hasn’t been easy.

“Everything has been orders of magnitude more challenging than in the pre-pandemic era,” Barouch said. But he’s optimistic — particularly compared to several months ago.

The NYT article takes us through the twists and turns of J&J vaccine development to this point — including remodeling adenoviruses to try and develop a scalable means to manufacture all the doses that will be needed. Huge questions remain about how the reproduction rate of vaccine-producing cells might affect how many doses the company can churn out.

“It can mean you have 300 million vaccines or 30 million,” said Paul Stoffels, chief scientific officer of J&J.