The Biden administration and COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers are actively discussing ways to ramp up production in the coming months, including partnering with other pharmaceutical companies to bottle the vaccine for distribution.
According to two people familiar with those talks, the Biden team is in talks with several companies to assist with the filling and finishing – filling of vaccine vials – part of the vaccine manufacturing process. Several of those companies have emerged as frontrunners and an announcement could be made in the coming days, those sources said.
When asked about the manufacturing partnership talks, a person who worked with the Biden COVID-19 team said, “All options are on the table.”
Similar partnerships have already been entered into in Europe. Last week, Sanofi announced it had signed an agreement with Pfizer to bottle its vaccine and that 100 million doses would be available across the European Union by the end of the year. Sanofi is in the process of developing its own COVID-19 vaccine with GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). In December, the companies said the vaccine would be delayed after disappointing results in older clinical trial patients. “We wondered how we could make ourselves useful in the present, to participate in the collective effort to end this crisis as soon as possible,” said Sanofi CEO Paul Hudson. Le Figaro. Politico provided a translation of the interview.
Merck also announced last week that it would stop developing both of its COVID-19 vaccine candidates, citing insufficient immune response. The company had announced the acquisition of AmpTec earlier this month as a way to expand the company’s mRNA capabilities.
The discussions about more production in the US come at a time when the Biden administration is working to scale up the supply of the vaccine to meet the growing demand for the shot. The partnership would ensure that states across the country get the doses they need once the general population is eligible for vaccination.
In recent weeks, states have reported a stock shortage, saying they don’t have enough doses to hand out to everyone who has scheduled vaccination appointments. At the same time, federal data shows that states have not yet administered all of the doses assigned and distributed to them. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) vaccine tracker shows that nearly 50 million doses have been distributed, but only 31 million have been administered. US officials told The Daily Beast last week that they believed millions of doses are still being lost in the distribution system.
“We believe that some healthcare providers regularly withhold doses intended as the first dose and instead as a reserve for second doses. We understand why, but it doesn’t have to and shouldn’t happen, ”Andy Slavitt, a senior advisor to Biden’s COVID-19 team, told reporters Monday.
The Biden administration announced last week that it is in the process of buying an additional 200 million vaccine doses from Pfizer and Moderna to ensure that 300 million Americans will be vaccinated by the end of the summer. It was not immediately clear how or if those companies had taken measures to expand production beyond their current capabilities.
Last week, Johnson and Johnson and Novavax released their COVID-19 data. Novavax reported that the data from the phase 3 study showed that the vaccine was about 90 percent effective. Johnson and Johnson said the data showed that the vaccine was only 66 percent effective in protecting against the virus, but 85 percent effective against preventing serious illness. The data from both companies shows that the vaccines are less effective against the South African COVID-19 variant. Johnson and Johnson plan to file a request for emergency use authorization with the Federal Drug Administration. The approval of that vaccine would help boost the supply of the vaccine in the coming months.