On July 21, I was pleased to represent Johnson & Johnson at a hearing before the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the U.S. House Energy & Commerce Committee, to update the Subcommittee on our efforts to develop a vaccine candidate to prevent COVID-19. The hearing, titled “Pathway to a Vaccine: Efforts to Develop a Safe, Effective and Accessible COVID-19 Vaccine,” provided a forum for important conversations around the rapid development of safe, effective vaccines that offer durable protection.
At the hearing, I had the opportunity to explain J&J’s efforts to develop our vaccine candidate and our commitment to providing more than one billion doses of our vaccine candidate at a not for profit price for emergency pandemic use upon regulatory authorization. I also discussed how our efforts are strengthened through collaborations with partners like the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Institutes of Health, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of Harvard Medical School and others.
We share many of the priorities that were raised by the Subcommittee, including securing manufacturing and supply capacity now while we continue our research program; actively communicating the safety and efficacy of vaccines to help build trust among the public; and, as we seek to enroll our future Phase 3 trials in the United States, striving to ensure significant representation of populations that have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, including Blacks, Latinx, Native Americans and those over 65 years of age.
We look forward to further discussions with our partners in the U.S. government and our colleagues from other companies as we continue to advance the development of our SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidate to combat COVID-19.
To learn more about Johnson & Johnson’s response efforts for COVID-19, visit https://www.jnj.com/coronavirus.
July 23, 2020
