Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
U.S., Pfizer hit deal on vaccine
100 million more doses in accord
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration and Pfizer said Wednesday that they had reached an agreement on supplying the United States by the end of July with an additional 100 million doses of the covid-19 vaccine made by the pharmaceutical giant and its German partner BioNTech.
The deal doubles the total number of doses the government has on order from Pfizer — enough to immunize 100 million people with a two-dose regimen. The government will pay $1.95 billion for the additional doses and has agreed to help Pfizer obtain the ingredients needed to make the vaccine.
The additional doses are unlikely to mean an expansion of early access to the shots, which are being rationed for health care workers and long-term-care residents and staff members as the coronavirus strains the
country’s medical system. But the added supply averts the possibility of a shortfall in the spring and summer, when the government anticipates being able to make immunization available to wider segments of the public.
“This new federal purchase can give Americans even more confidence that we will have enough supply to vaccinate every American who wants it by June 2021,” Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement.
Pfizer and the biotechnology company Moderna, which have received federal authorization to distribute coronavirus vaccines on an emergency basis, have now promised, between them, to provide the government with 400 million doses.
The shots will be free to anyone who receives them. The government began shipping the Pfizer vaccine to states last week and the one from Moderna this week.
“With these 100 million additional doses, the United States will be able to protect more individuals and hopefully end this devastating pandemic more quickly,” Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chief executive, said Wednesday.
According to data maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 1 million vaccine doses had been administered in the U.S. by Wednesday. Nearly 10 million doses had been distributed, mainly to large hospital systems equipped to rapidly inoculate large numbers of intensive-care unit nurses, respiratory therapists, service workers and others battling an intensifying surge of covid-19 infections.
As of Wednesday evening, the virus had infected 18.4 million people in the U.S. and killed more than 325,000.
The first vaccines are being given as the country faces a rapid surge in infections and deaths, and as some hospitals are exceeding their capacities. Over the past week, an average of 2,666 Americans died each day from the coronavirus — a record. Nearly 118,000 patients were hospitalized with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, in another record for the country.
With the products from Pfizer and Moderna, federal officials say they anticipate being able to deliver at least a first shot of the two-dose regimen to 100 million Americans by the end of February. Pfizer and Moderna have both promised that half of their doses will be available to the government for distribution by April 1.
The leaders of Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s initiative to hasten the development of vaccines and therapeutics, have stressed that other promising vaccine candidates will soon supplement this supply. Some of those additional candidates, which include single-dose regimens easier to store and administer, are in late-stage clinical trials, while others have yet to begin them.
The agreement reached Wednesday with Pfizer also includes options for the government to purchase an additional 400 million doses.
As part of the agreement, the government has agreed to use the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era law allowing the designation of certain supplies as essential in wartime or other national emergencies, to help Pfizer accelerate production.
The Trump administration has used the law on occasion, including to increase production of masks and ventilators. But the government has drawn criticism, including from public health experts, for not using the law more broadly or consistently for the production of personal protective equipment that has remained in short supply or to increase the availability of covid-19 tests earlier this year.
President-elect Joe Biden has called on the Trump administration to purchase more vaccine and to make greater use of the Defense Production Act for the raw materials needed for the pharmaceutical companies’ efforts and other pandemic-fighting purposes.
Pfizer has been stressing for several months its eagerness for the administration to help it gain vaccine-making supplies through this law, said people familiar with the negotiations, because some of the materials it needed had been snapped up by companies given priority under Operation Warp Speed.
Pfizer was the only company that did not take government money for research and development of a vaccine, which meant U.S. officials have had less insight into aspects of its manufacturing process and less certainty about where the company’s doses would be sold, federal officials have said.
Pfizer, for its part, had indicated to the government that it would be able to provide 70 million doses in the second quarter and an additional 30 million in the third quarter — but that it might be able to get to 100 million doses more quickly if it received help gaining access to certain raw materials, officials said.
Under Wednesday’s agreement, Pfizer is adhering to its original time frame even with government help, pledging to provide 70 million additional doses by June 30 and the other 30 million by the end of July.
The administration had earlier rejected opportunities to lock down more of the supply, causing Pfizer to commit hundreds of millions of doses to other countries. When administration officials recently returned to the drugmaker seeking to buy another 100 million doses, the question of support under the Defense Product Act became central to negotiations.
Separately, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it has joined forces with another big pharmaceutical company, Merck, to support the large-scale manufacturing of a promising treatment for patients suffering from severe covid-19 illness.
The treatment, still under investigation and not yet approved by the Food and Drug Administration, is known as MK-7110. It has the potential to minimize the damaging effects of an overactive immune response to covid-19. This immune overdrive unleashes a cascade of effects on the human body, complicating the efforts of doctors and nurses.
The government is paying Merck about $356 million to fast-track production of the treatment. Merck will deliver as many as 100,000 doses by June 30 if the FDA clears the treatment for emergency use.
The current wave of covid-19 is straining hospitals in a number of states. Having better treatments would help keep patients out of intensive care, improving their chances of survival and reducing the burden and stress on hospital staffs.
HOLIDAY TRAVEL
Even as case numbers rise across the country, millions of Americans are traveling ahead of the Christmas and New Year’s holidays despite pleas from public health experts that they stay home.
Many people at airports this week said they thought long and hard about whether to go somewhere for the holidays.
“My mom’s worth it. She needs my help,” said 34-yearold Jennifer Brownlee, a fisher from Bayou La Batre, Ala., who was waiting at the Tampa, Fla., airport for a flight to Oregon to see her mother, who recently lost a leg. “I know that God’s got me. He’s not going to let me get sick.”
More than 5 million people passed through the nation’s airport security checkpoints between Friday and Tuesday, according to the Transportation Security Administration.
That is down about 60% from the same time last year. But it amounts to about 1 million passengers per day, or about what the U.S. saw in the days leading up to Thanksgiving.
The AAA auto club projected that about 85 million people will travel between Wednesday and Jan. 3, most of them by car. That would be a drop of nearly a third from a year ago but still a big number in the middle of a pandemic.
U.S. Surgeon General Jerome Adams encouraged people to celebrate only with people in their households, but he added that if they can’t follow the guidance, they should take precautions, such as ensuring good home ventilation.
“We can’t let fatigue cause us to make poor decisions this holiday season that end up making us backtrack, especially when we are so incredibly close to getting ourselves and everyone else across the finish line,” he said, referring to the start of covid-19 vaccinations.
Health officials in Texas’ capital city again urged people to avoid holiday gatherings as hospitalizations of covid-19 patients soared heading into the Christmas weekend.
There is such a high rate of transmission in Austin that people should consider themselves at risk anywhere they go, said Dr. Mark Escott, the interim head of the Austin-Travis County Health Authority.
There has been a 97% increase in cases and an 80% increase in the seven-day average number of people hospitalized with the coronavirus in Austin since Dec. 1, Escott said.
Statewide, the number of daily hospitalizations in Texas this week exceeded 10,000 for the first time since an outbreak in July that saw hospitalizations near 11,000.
Nearly 26,000 people have died in Texas from covid-19, the second- highest death count in the country, according to researchers from Johns Hopkins University. Over the past two weeks, the rolling average of daily new cases has increased by 1,330, with 735 new cases per 100,000 people. One in every 254 people in Texas tested positive in the past week.
CANADIAN FLIGHTS
Elsewhere, Canada’s health regulator authorized a second covid-19 vaccine Wednesday as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said he will extend the suspension of flights from the United Kingdom because of a new variant of the virus.
Health Canada said the vaccine from Moderna is safe for use in the country, and the company said it anticipates starting shipments to Canada within 48 hours.
It follows the Dec. 9 approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine.
As many as 168,000 doses of the Moderna shot are set to arrive by the end of December, and 2 million are to arrive by the end of March.
Canada is to get 40 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine in 2021, enough to inoculate 20 million people, or about twothirds of the Canadian adult population.
Meanwhile, Trudeau announced that Canada will extend a suspension of passenger flights from the U.K. for another two weeks until Jan. 6. Flights were initially suspended for three days.
“There are new strains of the disease in places like the U.K. The situation is very serious,” Trudeau said.
“Today’s authorization is a critical step in ensuring additional COVID-19 vaccines are available to all Canadians in all parts of the country. The different storage and handling requirements of the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine mean that it can be distributed to isolated and remote communities, including the territories,” Health Canada said in a statement.
The Moderna vaccine needs to be stored at regular freezer temperatures, not the ultra-cold required for Pfizer-BioNTech’s shot.
Information for this article was contributed by Isaac StanleyAmy Goldstein, Laurie McGinley and Paul Schemm of The Washington Post; and by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar, Jonathan Lemire, Tamara Lush, Alexandra Olson, Ben Finley, Heather Hollingsworth, Sophia Tareen, Sarah Blake Morgan, Sophia Tulp, Rob Gillies and staff members of The Associated Press.