Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who sits on Pfizer’s board, defended the company’s move to ship fewer vials of the Covid-19 vaccine and count six doses per vial instead of five, saying it was the best way. is to ensure that the extra dose is delivered. used.
When the company began shipping vials of its vaccine last month, pharmacists found they could often get an extra dose from any vial that contained only five doses on paper. That discovery meant the United States could potentially get more doses of the vaccine than the 200 million the Department of Defense bought under its contract with Pfizer.
“The point here is that this is a very scarce resource. We have to make sure every dose is used,” he said in CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Monday. “The only way to do that is to market this as a six-dose bottle and provide the right equipment to extract that sixth dose, which is basically what Pfizer is doing.”
The New York Times reported Friday that in recent weeks, Pfizer executives have successfully urged Food and Drug Administration officials to revise the wording of the emergency use consent formulation of the vaccine to formally count the sixth dose towards the federal contract .
Some pharmacists were confused by the extra doses, or did not have the correct syringes to extract them and threw them away.
“During this pandemic, with the number of people dying around the world, it is critical that we use all available vaccines and vaccinate as many people as possible. To leave an extra dose in each vial that can be used. To vaccinate more people would be a tragedy, ”said company spokeswoman Amy Rose.
Gottlieb said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Monday that the move will help the US accelerate the distribution of vaccine doses, adding that Pfizer can now deliver 120 million doses of the vaccine in the first quarter of 2021, up from 100 million before the label change. .
But the movement is pressuring American pharmacists to get six doses from each vial, requiring a number of specialty syringes called low dead space syringes. The US government, which ships kits containing syringes and doses of the vaccine, has contracts with syringe manufacturers such as Becton Dickinson, the world’s largest syringe manufacturer, to deliver the supplies to local officials.
But Becton Dickinson does not have the capacity to substantially increase the supply of the syringes in the US, Reuters reported earlier Monday, questioning the number of vials from which the US can take six doses.
Gottlieb said the vaccines only count as six-dose vials, where local jurisdictions also get the correct syringes to extract the final dose.
Gottlieb noted that when Pfizer filed for emergency use approval of its vaccine, it knew that six doses could be obtained from each vial, but that revising the application’s wording would have delayed approval of the vaccine. So the company went ahead and sought permission with the intention of later revising the formulation to reflect the six-dose vials.
He added that the US FDA took longer than regulators in other countries to implement the change. Authorities in the UK, Switzerland and Israel, he said, had all already revised the wording of their permissions for the Pfizer vaccine to indicate that each vial contains six doses.
Gottlieb, the former head of the FDA, clarified that the change will not be applied retroactively, meaning all vials previously shipped will be counted as five doses.
But “at some point you had to make an accommodation to pay for the doses,” said Gottlieb.
Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and serves on the boards of Pfizer, genetic testing startup Tempus, healthcare company Aetion Inc. and biotech company Illumina. He is also co-chair of the Healthy Sail Panel of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Royal Caribbean.