The Biden administration plans to spend billions of dollars to expand manufacturing capacity with the goal of producing at least one billion additional doses a year beginning in the second half of 2022.
The investment is part of a new plan by the White House to partner with industry to address immediate vaccine needs in the United States and overseas and to prepare for future Pandemics. It comes on top of recent decisions to buy enough of Pfizer's new Covid-19 pill for about 10 million courses of treatment, and to spend $3 billion on rapid over-the-counter tests, which are needed to detect the virus early enough for the Pfizer drug to work.
At a time when Americans are desperate for normal life and caseloads are creeping up with winter approaching, the moves amount to an expansive new effort to control the Pandemic.
The White House hopes that the Food and Drug Administration will approve requests from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna to offer booster shots to everyone 18 and older.
The United States will be the "arsenal of vaccines" for the world, according to President Biden. The United States could be plunged into crisis again if the vaccine rate in other parts of the world is not raised.
The need is global. The director of global affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services testified on Capitol Hill that more than half of the five million coronaviruses deaths had occurred in low- and middle-income countries.
She said that less than 10 percent of Africa's population is vaccine-free. Even health care workers on the front lines of the P.C. are unvaccinated, as they are struggling to combat other diseases.
There are risks to expanding vaccine manufacturing through public-private alliances. The Baltimore facility that ruined millions of doses of Johnson & Johnson's coronaviruses vaccine was a manufacturing partnership with the federal government. Emergent was severed by the Biden administration.
The plan will be different according to administration officials. The intent is to invest in companies with experience making vaccines that can be expanded into production, according to the chief science officer for the Covid-19 response.
Licensing technology from other vaccine manufacturers is required for that to happen.
Dr. Kessler said in an interview that it was about preparing for the next Pandemic and assuring expanded capacity against Covid variants. The goal is to have vaccine capability within six to nine months of identification of the future pathogen and to have enough vaccine for all Americans.
The plan is not fully figured out, and the agency issued a request for ideas from industry. The American Rescue Plan, which Mr. Biden signed into law earlier this year, is estimated to cost several billion.
The government wanted responses from industry within 30 days. Only two major vaccine makers, Pfizer and Moderna, are currently using the technology, and those companies use contract manufacturers to do the work for them.
Pfizer pledged to contribute to the fight against Covid-19 in a statement on Wednesday. An email message was not responded to by officials at Moderna. The engaging industry could be difficult, according to Steve Brozak, an investment banker.
Without a specific time plan, companies may not be interested. If the administration wants to ramp up vaccine manufacturing, it will have to increase production of other vaccine components.
Some activists who have been pushing the Biden administration to lean on Pfizer and Moderna to share their technology with manufacturers overseas were mixed about the plan. The National Institutes of Health is in a patent dispute with Moderna, which received billions in taxpayer funding, over who deserves credit for inventing the central component of the company's coronaviruses vaccine.
Partners In Health's chief medical officer said that the idea of making a business plan with two companies rather than a public health plan was disturbing. Biden has the power to demand the sharing of patents and know-how with Moderna because it was taxpayer funded.
A group of activists went to the home of Mr. Biden's chief of staff and put a fake mountain of bones on the sidewalk to protest the administration's slow progress. A group protested outside of Mr. Zients's home.
Dr. Kessler said that domestic manufacturing is important for both the U.S. supply and global supply.
Partnering with big drug makers is not guaranteed. Mr. Biden brokered a deal with the pharmaceutical giant to manufacture Johnson & Johnson's vaccine for other countries. The partnership fit in with the president's vision of a manufacturing campaign like the one Franklin D. Roosevelt spearheaded to produce supplies for World War II.
The deal between the two companies did not go as expected. The vaccine's key ingredient will not be produced by the end of the year, but by April, according to Dr. Kessler.
The American Rescue Plan, put together by Congress, has a total of $16.05 billion this year and could be used to procure and manufacture treatments, vaccines and other tools for ending the Pandemic.
In an analysis released this summer, the AIDS advocacy group Prep4All found that the administration spent $145 million to expand vaccine manufacturing, but only $12 million of it came from the American Rescue Plan. Most of the time, they went to retrofitting the production lines.
The author of the study pointed to the experience with Emergent and Merck to suggest that simply paying industry to build new production lines will not work. The group wants the government to build a vaccine manufacturing facility and hire a contract manufacturer to run it.
The Biden administration is at two different points in the road. They have to be applauded for their commitment to address manufacturing and supply issues. We need the Biden administration to learn from history.
Public Citizen wants the government to invest $25 billion in one year to make eight billion doses of messenger RNA, enough to meet global need. Peter Maybarduk is the director of access to medicines at Public Citizen.
Sharing doses is charity and desperately needed. Sharing knowledge is justice.
