Pfizer halved the doses of anti-Covid vaccines it planned to manufacture in 2020

Pharmaceutical Pfizer has announced that it has halved the number of doses of its Covid-19 vaccine that it hopes to manufacture and distribute in the rest of the year.

This is due to supply chain focus issues, the company reported Thursday.

Initially, Pfizer planned to distribute 100 million of its vaccine against covid-19, already authorized in the United Kingdom and awaiting an imminent authorization in the United States and in Europe, but it does not commit now to produce that 50 million before the end of the year.

However, Pfizer maintains its production forecast of over a billion doses by 2021.

Next year, the vaccine will begin to be injected into the general population and begin the true global vaccination campaign against the virus.

“We are late. Some of the first batches of raw materials did not meet standards. We solved it, but we ran out of time to meet the projections,” admitted a Pfizer official to the Wall Street Journal.

The vaccine relies on raw materials sourced from the United States and Europe, and reaching the scale needed to mass-produce the vials started to get complicated in November.

Vaccines require a diverse number of sophisticated ingredients such as antiviral agents, antiseptics, sterile water or a fragment of SARS-CoV-2 RNA.

A Pfizer spokesperson recalled that the speed at which the vaccine has been researched and developed is unprecedented, the EFE agency published.

Tests of the vaccine in 44,000 people around the world have shown it to be effective in 95% of COVID-19 cases.