J&J reportedly scaling back production of its COVID-19 vaccines

Yahoo Finance health care correspondent Anjalee Khemlani details Johnson & Johnson's plans to scale back production of its COVID vaccines.

Video Transcript

[AUDIO LOGO]

DAVE BRIGGS: All right, Johnson & Johnson is reportedly cutting production of its unpopular COVID-19 vaccine. Anjalee Khemlani back with us, second time in studio.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: I know.

DAVE BRIGGS: Lucky for us on a Friday. What can you tell us?

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: Well, I can tell you that this slash in production is happening again. This is the second time that we've heard of Johnson & Johnson slashing its production. But specifically this time around, according to reports, the company has cut back on its contracts with the manufacturers it was working with, including Catalent and Sanofi. We did hear earlier on last year from CFO Joe Wolk. Here's what he had to say then.

JOE WOLK: Right now, we are, like we would do for any product, rightsizing our manufacturing footprint, our R&D programs, to correlate better with the demand that's out there. And so we are tapering back. But we're still in the business. We're going to meet our regulatory as well as our commercial commitments, and just rightsizing it for, really, the business prospects that are out there.

ANJALEE KHEMLANI: That commercial commitment is really a key point there because that has been the focus of a few cases that have happened-- or, not really cases, but let's talk about it in terms of arbitration, specifically with Merck, one of the manufacturers that came in to help save Johnson & Johnson at a time that it had manufacturing struggles early on in the pandemic.

We don't want to go over the whole history, but it's safe to say that Johnson & Johnson has really struggled with this COVID vaccine during the pandemic, first with issues with reports of blood clots, as well as the manufacturing concern. So this just looks more and more like the company could be close to, you know, maybe stopping. I don't know. I would love to ask them that. And I believe I've had in the past on whether or not they would actually stop producing the COVID vaccine, considering globally there's no demand for it now.

DAVE BRIGGS: Yeah, you don't hear a whisper about it, do you? Anj, thanks so much. Great information. Enjoy the weekend.