Warning of shortages, drugmakers race to stretch vaccine dose

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 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.”

The Moderna dosage research, which also involves scientists from Operation Warp Speed, the government’s vaccine initiative, could take two months, said Mascola, who described the work in an interview Tuesday. Any dosing changes would have to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

For the moment, the biggest problem is not a shortage of vaccine but the difficulties that state and local governments face in distributing the doses they have. But in interviews, both Mascola and Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, warned of possible shortages to come. “To me, what appears to be the imminent problem that’s right in front of us is getting people vaccinated with the doses that we have,” Fauci said. “That could change.”

Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Health Committee, said Tuesday that states needed more support and guidance from the federal government — an issue she said she raised Monday with Gen. Gustave Perna, chief operating officer of Operation Warp Speed. President Donald Trump “wants us all to just give him a lot of credit for having a vaccine this fast,” Murray said. “But as the Trump administration has done with testing and everything else, it’s, ‘We did this — now it’s up to the states.’ Well, the states don’t have capacity, and there isn’t stability in the supply chain.”