U.S. aims to create 1 billion doses a year Sheryl Gay Stolberg
The White House, under pressure from activists to increase the supply of coronavirus vaccines to poor nations, plans to invest billions of dollars to expand U.S. manufacturing capacity, with the goal of producing at least one billion doses a year beginning in the second half of 2022, two top advisers to President Biden said Tuesday.
The investment is the first step in a new plan, announced Wednesday, for the government to partner with industry to address immediate vaccine needs overseas and domestically and to prepare for future pandemics, said Dr. David Kessler, who oversees vaccine distribution for the administration, and Jeff Zients, Biden’s coronavi- rus response coordinator.
“This is about assuring expanded capacity against Covid variants and also preparing for the next pandemic,” Kessler said. “The goal, in the case of a future pandemic, a future virus, is to have vaccine capability within six to nine months of identification of that pandemic pathogen, and to have enough vaccines for all Americans.”
The move comes as the Biden administration also plans to buy enough of Pfizer’s new Covid-19 pill for about 10 million courses of treatment to be delivered in the next 10 months, paying over $5 billion, according to people familiar with the agreement. The government has also pledged $3 billion for rapid over-the-counter tests, which are needed to detect the virus before the Pfizer drug can be prescribed.
Taken together, the invest- ments amount to an aggres- sive effort to vanquish a pandemic that is heading into its third year. When given promptly to trial groups of high-risk unvaccinated peo- ple who developed symptoms of the disease, the Pfizer drug sharply reduced the risk of hospitalization and death. Pfizer applied on Tuesday for federal authorization of the drug on an emergency basis.
The antiviral drugs have helped inspire hope among senior administration offi- cials that the United States will be able to curb the devastating toll from the virus. Their promise depends in part on access to testing, because the pills have proved to work in five days or less after symptoms develop.
But the tests are pricey. While federal regulators have cleared a dozen of them, a test typically costs about $12 and not everyone can easily obtain one. One of the newest rapid tests costs $7, though, and by the end of the year the overall supply is projected to be nearly 10 times what it was in August, federal officials said.
The idea for the new pub- lic-private vaccine partnership is still in its early stages, and the price tag is uncertain. Kessler, who has been working on the proposal for months, esti- mated it at “several billion.” The money has been set aside as part of the American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package Biden signed into law in March. The Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency intends to issue a “request for information” to solicit ideas from companies that have experience man- ufacturing vaccines using mRNA technology. Zients said officials wanted responses “in a very short period of time, 30 days, to understand how most efficiently, effectively and reliably we can increase manufacturing.” Activists, many of them veterans of the AIDS epi- demic, have been demanding for months that Biden do more to scale up global vaccine manufacturing capac- ity. Some, furious with what they regard as the administration’s slow progress, turned up at the home of Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff, in September and deposited a fake mountain of bones on the sidewalk in protest. At the same time, the administration is offering booster shots to millions of vaccinated Americans, despite criticism from World Health Organization officials and other experts who say the doses should go to lowand lower-middle-income countries first.