WASHINGTON – President Biden on Monday canceled a visit to a coronavirus vaccine factory run by Emergent BioSolutions after the New York Times published a lengthy investigation into how the company gained tremendous influence over the nation’s emergency medical reserve.
Instead of visiting Emergent’s Baltimore facility on Wednesday, the president will convene a meeting at the White House with executives from pharmaceutical giants Merck & Co. and Johnson & Johnson, who will also attend the Baltimore session, White House officials said. . Merck and Emergent have a separate partnership with Johnson & Johnson to manufacture the company’s coronavirus vaccine.
“We think it was a more appropriate place for the meeting,” Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, told reporters.
Emergent has more than $ 600 million in contracts with the federal government to manufacture vaccines against coronavirus and expand its “fill and finish” capacity to complete the vaccine and therapeutic manufacturing process. A senior government official said that only executives from Merck and Johnson & Johnson would attend the White House session on Wednesday.
An Emergent spokeswoman did not immediately respond to questions about the cancellation on Monday. The spokeswoman, Nina DeLorenzo, had previously defended the company’s business with the government in written responses to the questions, saying: “When almost no one else invested in preparing to protect the American public from serious threats, the Emergent did, and the country is better prepared today because of that. “
The Times investigation focused on the emergency reserve, the National Strategic Stock, which became famous during the coronavirus pandemic for its lack of essential supplies, such as N95 masks and other personal protective equipment.
Decisions on how to spend the repository’s limited budget should be based on careful assessments by government officials on how best to save lives, but The Times found that they were largely driven by the financial demands and interests of a handful of companies. of biotechnology that specializes in products that address terrorist threats instead of infectious diseases.
The main one is the emerging one. For most of the past decade, the government has spent nearly half of Emergent’s half-billion-dollar annual budget on anthrax vaccine stock, the Times found.
In the competition for funding, pandemic preparedness products – including N95s – have repeatedly lost, according to the Times investigation, which relied on more than 40,000 pages of documents and interviews with more than 60 people with insider knowledge of the stock.
THE Image of some health professionals using garbage bags for personal protection has become a lasting symbol of the government’s failed response. Even so, the government paid Emergent $ 626 million in 2020 for products that included vaccines to protect against a terrorist attack using anthrax.
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For much of Emergent’s two-decade history, its flagship product was an anthrax vaccine, first licensed in 1970, which the company bought in 1998 from Michigan. Over time, the price per dose that the government agreed to pay to the emerging market increased almost six times, accounting for inflation.
Ms. DeLorenzo previously defended the company’s prices as fair. “You can’t protect people from anthrax for less than the cost of a latte,” she wrote by email.
Emergent’s sales to the government in 2020 also included a new anthrax vaccine that has not yet been approved as safe and needed special authorization to be stored. In the months leading up to the coronavirus pandemic, the Trump administration awarded the company about $ 3 billion in long-term contracts; last year, the government agreed to pay the company more than $ 600 million to manufacture other companies’ coronavirus vaccines at its Baltimore facility. Emergent is now manufacturing coronavirus vaccines for AstraZeneca and also for Johnson & Johnson.
Emergent, whose board is made up of former federal employees, has implemented a lobbying budget more typical of some large pharmaceutical companies, the Times found. At times, he resorted to tactics considered covert, even in Washington. Competing efforts to develop a better, cheaper vaccine against anthrax, for example, failed after Emergent maneuvered its rivals, documents and interviews show.
Ms. DeLorenzo characterized the company’s lobby as “education-oriented” and “appropriate and necessary”.