President Biden’s coronavirus response team learned two things in his first week in office: Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot coronavirus vaccine was highly effective – but the company was millions of doses late in its production schedule.
The preliminary talks that began under the Trump administration about a vaccine manufacturing partnership between the pharmaceutical giant and its competitor, Merck, whose own vaccination attempt failed, were “incremental” and got nowhere quickly, according to two senior management officials. And Johnson & Johnson seemed reluctant to commit to a large-scale deal with Merck, officials said.
“They just weren’t involved,” one of the employees told CNN.
That changed when Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus czar, called Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky on a Sunday in early February and urged the company to find the moment, emphasizing that the US is in a ” national emergency “and that it was time to be” big and bold “.
“You cannot be incremental and small in your thinking. We have to overcome this problem,” said a senior government official, reporting on the conversation, which lasted an hour longer than the scheduled 15 minutes.
Zients reminded Gorsky – a West Point graduate and United States military veteran – of Johnson & Johnson’s major contributions during World War II, including making the first duct tape and other military supplies. Just as Americans remembered Johnson & Johnson’s contributions at the time, their efforts to speed up vaccination of Americans would be their new legacy, said Zients, according to two senior officials.
“It was really a turning point,” said one of the employees, noting that Gorsky “embraced” the approach and discussions about a large-scale partnership with Merck quickly became more serious.
Hanging from that conversation and others between Biden administration officials and executives from both companies was Biden’s authority under the Defense Production Act to compel companies to associate if they didn’t want to. A senior management official said that authority was never explicitly threatened in talks with both companies, but added that this was implicitly a motivating factor.
“DPA is always there, implicitly as a tool that brings people to the table and puts them on tiptoe,” said the official.
The government would be willing to invoke the DPA coercive authorities if the two companies had not reached an agreement, but they did not have to, said the official. Instead, Biden is exercising other authorities under the DPA to invest $ 105 million to help Merck retrofit its manufacturing facilities to produce the vaccine on a scale and to streamline the supply of vaccine production materials to Johnson & Johnson.
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