Gardner Harris

So they didn't themselves have a good way of manufacturing this.

They hire a manufacturing company based in Baltimore to manufacture their shot.

But this company, Emergent it's called, had a history of terrible manufacturing problems.

Again, something Johnson & Johnson knew.

So this company starts trying to manufacture it.

Unfortunately, they are also manufacturing a similar vaccine from AstraZeneca, and the two vaccines end up cross-contaminating each other in this facility again and again and again, something Johnson & Johnson's own investigators knew was happening.

But, of course, for the PR benefit, Johnson & Johnson does not let on.

And, in fact, the CEO of Johnson & Johnson attends multiple events at the White House to bask in the praise from President Biden and others that Johnson & Johnson is going to save the day, even though at that point they must have known that they were not going to save the day, that their vaccine was contaminated.

Eventually, the contamination comes out.

Most of Johnson & Johnson's lots are condemned.

The ones that do come out, Shamita, as you said, end up causing all kinds of problems.

People start getting, particularly young women, start getting these clotting disorders.

And then even more concerning, some people start getting this neurological condition called Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which is a terrible and frightening condition that leads to horrible palsy.

So...

As you know, vaccines are given to healthy people to protect them from illness.

So any side effects that affect people in more than one in a million are simply unacceptable.

And Johnson & Johnson's side effects were in the range of one in 100,000 and perhaps even one in 10,000.

So as these side effects build up,

As the manufacturing woes keep Johnson & Johnson's vaccine from really playing much of a role at all, it basically starts to fade into the background.

And eventually, because of these safety woes, the FDA pulls its authorization from the vaccine entirely.