Use of Moderna Vaccine Halted Due to Unknown Contaminants

The American company Moderna's batch of coronavirus vaccine has been halted after unknown contaminants were discovered following its shipment to Japan. This was reported by the Kyodo news agency.

The Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare announced that the use of approximately 1.63 million doses has been suspended and that investigations related to the incident will begin.

It was noted that the particles of the contaminant measure several millimeters. The vaccine produced in Spain was distributed across vaccination centers in five prefectures in Japan, including the capital, Tokyo.

In addition to Moderna, Japan is also using vaccines produced by the British-Swedish AstraZeneca and the American-German consortium Pfizer/BioNTech.

Currently, 68.1 million people (53.6% of the population) have received the first dose of the vaccine in the country, while 54.1 million people (42.6%) have received the second dose.