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Perhaps you’re snacking on a banana, sipping some coffee or sitting in front of your computer and taking a break from work to read this article. Most likely, those goods – as well as your smartphone, refrigerator and virtually every other object in your home – were once loaded onto a large container in another country and traveled thousands of miles via ships crossing the ocean before ultimately arriving at your doorstep. 

Walgreens has inoculated hundreds of thousands of Americans against Covid-19 this year using the vaccine developed by Pfizer and Germany’s BioNTech. But the pharmacy chain has not been following guidance from federal health officials about the timing of second doses.

The Biden administration has put Johnson & Johnson in charge of a Baltimore manufacturing plant that ruined 15 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine and stopped the facility from making another vaccine developed by AstraZeneca.

When an East Baltimore plant run by Emergent BioSolutions found that a large batch of urgently needed COVID-19 vaccine had to be trashed because workers used the wrong ingredients, the company said the episode was “disappointing” but showed that its rigorous quality controls worked.

Scrutiny follows drugmaker’s disclosure that it scrapped distribution of doses after an ingredient didn’t meet quality standards at a contract manufacturing facility