President Biden’s coronavirus response team learned two things during its first week in office: Johnson & Johnson’s one-time coronavirus vaccine was highly effective – but the company was millions of doses behind its production schedule.
Preliminary talks that began under the Trump administration about a vaccine manufacturing partnership between the pharmaceutical giant and its competitor, Merck, whose own vaccination attempt had failed, were “incremental” and gotten nowhere, according to two senior officials. And Johnson & Johnson seemed reluctant to make a large-scale deal with Merck, officials said.
“They just weren’t all in,” one of the officials told CNN.
That changed when Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus tsar, called Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky on a Sunday in early February and urged the company to meet the moment, stressing that the US was in a “ national emergency ‘and that it was time. to go “big and bold”.
“You can’t be incremental and small in your thinking. We have to overcome this problem,” said a senior administration official, telling the conversation that lasted an hour longer than the scheduled 15 minutes.
Zients reminded Gorsky – a West Point graduate and US military veteran – of Johnson & Johnson’s major contributions during World War II, including the production of the very first duct tape and other military supplies. Just as Americans remembered Johnson & Johnson’s contributions back then, their efforts to speed up Americans’ vaccination would be their new legacy, Zients said, according to two senior officials.
“That really was a turning point,” said one of the officials, noting that Gorsky “embraced” the approach and that discussions of a large-scale partnership with Merck soon became more serious.
That conversation and other conversations between Biden clerks and executives from both companies rolled over was Biden’s authority under the Defense Production Act to force the companies to cooperate if they were unwilling. A senior management official said authority was never explicitly threatened in conversations with either company, but added that it was implicitly a motivational factor.
“The DPA is always there, implicitly as a tool, bringing people to the table and putting people on their guard,” said the official.
The administration would have been willing to appeal to the DPA’s coercive authorities had the two companies not reached an agreement, but it was not necessary, the official said. Instead, Biden exercises other powers under the DPA to invest $ 105 million to help Merck adapt its manufacturing facilities to produce the vaccine to scale and to accelerate the delivery of key vaccine manufacturing materials to Johnson & Johnson.
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