Scientists looking at ways to stretch vaccines
WASHINGTON — Federal officials and drugmakers, faced with a slower-than-expected rollout of the coronavirus vaccine, are racing to find ways to expand the supply, looking at lowering the required dosage and extracting more doses from the supplies they have.
Just weeks into the vaccine program, scientists at the National Institutes of Health and drugmaker Moderna are analyzing data to see if they can double the supply of the company’s coronavirus vaccine by cutting doses in half. The study, though long planned, is increasingly urgent in the face of looming shortages as the country tries to fight off a surging pandemic.
Officials are also rushing to find supplies of more efficient syringes that could extract an additional dose from vials of the Pfizer-biontech vaccine. That could bolster the Pfizer supply by 20 percent.
With more than 355,000 Americans already dead of COVID-19, nearly 21 million cases reported in the United States and hospitals overflowing, the need to inoculate people grows more urgent every day. The nation is facing twin problems. At the moment, it has only enough vaccine on order to cover 185 million Americans by the end of June. At the same time, doses that vaccine makers rushed out of their factories are sitting unused and are in danger of expiring.
The Trump administration has shipped more than 15 million vaccine doses, and millions more are already in the federal government’s hands. Yet only 4.5 million people have received them so far. State and local public health officials, already overwhelmed with rising infections, are struggling to administer the vaccine to hospital workers and at-risk older Americans while most people remain in the dark about when they might be protected.
Countries in Europe are grappling with their own rocky vaccine rollouts, only adding to a sense of panic as a new, more contagious variant of the novel coronavirus spreads across the globe.
“The total supply of vaccine has always been a concern,” said Dr. John R. Mascola, director of the NIH’S Vaccine Research Center, adding, “It’s important to do these analyses that we’re doing, and have all that data in our pocket in the event that there’s a need to use it.”
Even if distribution kinks smooth out, a vaccine shortage looms in coming months because only two products so far — one developed by Moderna and the other by Pfizer-bionTech — have been authorized for emergency use. Both vaccine makers have committed all their doses until midyear. That still leaves uncovered about 60 million adult Americans eligible to be vaccinated.