Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer expects to get Covid-19 vaccines to the masses faster, cutting manufacturing time almost in half, the company confirmed on Monday.
By increasing production and being more efficient, the company hopes to reduce the production time for a vaccine batch from 110 to around 60 days.
“Just last month, we doubled production,” Chaz Calitri, who runs the company’s main plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan, told USA Today.
In December, Pfizer became the first pharmaceutical manufacturer to obtain an emergency authorization for its coronavirus vaccine from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. And about a week later, he started sending his vaccines.
Unlike other vaccine developers, Pfizer did not take any federal funds for research or development from the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed.
The vaccine’s launch quickly developed bottlenecks and soon there were complaints from state governors that they were not getting enough doses with the Trump administration.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis even suggested that Pfizer was having manufacturing problems, which prompted a quick denial from the company’s CEO, Albert Bourla.
On Monday, 59.3 million doses of Covid-19 vaccines were delivered in the United States and 42.4 million doses were administered, according to the vaccine tracker at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
