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Pfizer Inc. the US will be able to deliver 200 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines by the end of May, two months earlier than previously expected, the executive said.
Chief Executive Officer Albert Bourla said Tuesday that the drug manufacturer and its partner, BioNTech SE, will be able to deliver the doses to the US well in advance of an earlier July 31 deadline due to a change in the label of the vaccine that healthcare providers can extract an additional dose from each vial.
The count of six doses per vial went into effect Monday and applies to future supply contracts, a Pfizer representative said.
In the US, Pfizer and BioNTech will deliver 120 million doses in the first quarter, 20 million more than initially promised, Bourla said in an interview with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait at the Year Ahead Summit, which will be held almost this year.
Bourla added that Pfizer and BioNTech would get more doses to the European Union before the end of the second quarter. The companies’ vaccine regimen requires two doses to provide complete protection against symptomatic cases of Covid-19.
New York-based Pfizer has provided governments with 36 combinations of commercially available needles and syringes to get the last dose out of the vials, Bourla said. The drug giant knew the bottles were inside until six vaccine doses, he added, noting that it needed to generate data at the beginning of the year to obtain approvals for use from government agencies around the world.
The change in Pfizer’s timeline comes amid heightened concerns about the slow pace of vaccine introduction and concerns about a limited dose range. Bourla said the US vaccination campaign was particularly slow for the first few weeks, although he expects the rate of doses administered to improve.
Roll out of vaccine
Vaccinations in the US began on December 14, just days after the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was approved for emergency use. Moderna Inc.’s vaccine, which relies on similar messenger RNA technology, was released shortly after. So far, there are according to Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker. An average of 1.25 million doses per day were administered in the past week.
In total, Pfizer and BioNTech have said they plan to produce 2 billion doses by 2021, a 50% increase from last year’s estimates. While the companies plan to ramp up production with the help of additional contract manufacturers, the new target also includes a label change that will allow doctors to get six doses instead of five from each vaccine vial.
Bourla said it is important to administer the second dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine within the appropriate time frame, evaluated and confirmed by clinical studies, namely 19 to 42 days. No data suggests the vaccine will be effective if a second dose is administered after 42 days, Bourla said.
Still, some governments are willing to accept the trade-off of lower immunity to inoculate more people.
“Every government faces a very complicated situation, of course,” he said.
Bourla said the company is in talks with several governments for additional doses, but declined to comment on whether such discussions were held with the Biden government.
Booster for variants
As two new spots of the virus spread worldwide, Pfizer and BioNTech are also developing booster shots that can protect against various mutations.
“Every time a new variant comes out, we have to be able to test whether it is or not [our vaccine] is effective, ”said Bourla. “Once we discover something that isn’t as effective, we’ll be able to produce a booster dose very, very quickly that will be a slight variation on the current vaccine.”
Bourla’s comments follow the news that Moderna is working on a similar booster shot. On Monday, Moderna said the vaccine offers protection against two known coronavirus variants, but plans to initiate human studies on a booster shot for a South African strain that could potentially reduce immunity faster.
While Bourla doesn’t expect the coronavirus to be eradicated, he said the pharmaceutical industry has the tools needed to make the virus look like the flu.
“That means it would not disrupt our lives or socioeconomics. We have to be very vigilant about the strains out there and very vigilant about vaccinating people, ‘Bourla said.
People may need a one-time annual Covid vaccine developed every year to combat every species expected to circulate, he said. Pfizer is working on next-generation versions of its vaccine that will have simpler storage requirements for that purpose.
– With the help of Drew Armstrong
(Updates with extra details and context throughout)