In a press release issued Thursday, Pfizer said that the company has millions of doses of its Covid-19 vaccines sitting in warehouses that have not been delivered because the company has not received shipping instructions from the federal government.
Pfizer said that the company has so far shipped 2.9 million doses of its mRNA Covid-19 vaccine, which it produced with German company BioNTech, to locations specified by the U.S. government around the country.
The company also said that it hasn’t experienced any production issues or shipping delays in regards to its vaccine.
The statement comes in the wake of several public comments from Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who told reporters this week that Pfizer was experiencing “manufacturing challenges” and “hiccups.”
Unlike other Covid-19 vaccine candidates, Pfizer declined to take any U.S. government funding from Operation Warp Speed to manufacture its vaccine, instead footing most of the development costs itself.
CRUCIAL QUOTE
“We have continuously shared with Operation Warp Speed (OWS) and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services through weekly meetings every aspect of our production and distribution capabilities,” the Pfizer press release said. “They have visited our facilities, walked the production lines and been updated on our production planning as information has become available.”
KEY BACKGROUND
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was granted Emergency Use Authorization from the FDA on December 11. That week, sources told Forbes that the U.S. government declined an option to purchase an additional 500 million doses of Pfizer’s vaccine. Currently, the U.S. has only purchased enough doses of the vaccine to vaccinate 50 million people.
WHAT TO WATCH FOR
Today, an FDA vaccine advisory committee is assessing biotech company Moderna’s mRNA vaccine for Covid-19. The committee will decide whether or not to issue an endorsement to the FDA, and the second Emergency Use Authorization for a Covid-19 vaccine could happen as soon as this evening.
