A Pfizer executive said he and the company are “confident” in their ability to deliver 2 billion doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year in an interview with the Associated Press published on Sunday.
“At the moment, we can potentially deliver around 2 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2021,” Mike McDermott, Pfizer’s president of global delivery, told AP.
“We are confident in this commitment, but of course we are constantly looking for ways to make and distribute more doses more quickly,” he added.
McDermott, who has worked at Pfizer for 30 years, said in his interview that the company is working to increase the efficiency of vaccine development, through methods that include adding more manufacturing lines, using contract manufacturers and doubling the size of the vaccines. lots.
“There is an extreme need to vaccinate more people quickly,” he said. “We are expanding our ability to produce more vaccines as quickly as possible.”
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine became the first to be approved in the United States in December. But since then, more contagious variants of COVID-19, first discovered in the UK and South Africa, have arrived in the United States, raising concerns about the effectiveness of current vaccines against strains.
McDermott said that the construction of the genetic code of the virus messenger RNA by Pfizer is “the perfect science to make changes quickly”, if necessary.
“In essence, there would be no changes to the manufacturing network,” he said. “This altered genetic material would enter the system – and production would begin immediately with a new version of the vaccine.”
Pfizer-BioNTech is one of two vaccines, along with the Moderna vaccine, approved for emergency use in the USA, both requiring two doses.
More than 27.2 million doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine have been administered in the country, compared with more than 25.5 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, according to data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
In the meantime, the CDC has documented 981 cases of the variant first found in the UK in 37 states and 13 cases of the variant first discovered in South Africa in five states.
Initial data indicated that the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may help protect against mutations in these two variants.