US inks Moderna deal; official says vaccine not a race

NEW YORK/ MOSCOW: The US has entered an agreement with drugmaker Moderna to acquire 100 million doses of its potential Covid-19 vaccine for around $1.5 billion, the company and White House said on Tuesday.

The US in recent weeks has made deals to acquire hundreds of millions of doses of potential Covid-19 vaccines from several companies as part of its Operation Warp Speed programme, which aims to deliver a vaccine in the country by the end of the year.

Moderna’s price per dose comes to around $30.50 per person for a two dose regimen.

With the exception of its deal with AstraZeneca, which offered a lower price per drug in exchange for upfront research and development costs, all the deals price Covid-19 vaccines between $20 to $42 for a two dose course of treatment.

Moderna’s vaccine candidate, mRNA-1273, is one of the few that have already advanced to the final stage of testing and is on track to be completed in September, the company said this month.

Moderna’s deal with the US only pays out in full if the drugmaker hits certain unspecific timing benchmarks for vaccine delivery. The US has advanced purchase agreements with Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and BioNTech, and Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline for their respective vaccine candidates.

The agreements would lock in more than 500 million doses of Covid-19 vaccine for the US, assuming that the companies involved receive regulatory approval.

Meanwhile, the US health secretary said the push to develop a vaccine is “not a race to be first”, in comments made after Russia claimed to have registered its first vaccine. He said the US is combining the powers of its government, economy and biopharma industry to “deliver as quickly as we can for the benefit of the United States’ citizens, but also for the people of the world, safe and effective vaccines”.