Pfizer cut doses of coronavirus vaccines

Pharmaceutical company Pfizer has halved the number of doses of its COVID-19 vaccine that it plans to manufacture and distribute throughout the rest of the year due to supply chain focus issues, a the company reported Thursday. It is not yet clear how this will affect the commitment to deliver 1,500,000 doses to Argentina.

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 projections of more than one billion doses by 2021, when the vaccine will begin injecting 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 were not up to standard. We fixed it, but we ran out of time to meet the projections,” a Pfizer official told the newspaper. 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 it began 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. In just ten months, the drugmaker tested the response to the vaccine while launching a massive manufacturing and worldwide distribution operation, which typically takes at least a decade. Tests of the vaccine in 44,000 people around the world have shown it to be effective in 95% of COVID-19 cases. Assembly and distribution of the preparation will be carried out from two Pfizer centers in Michigan and Puurs (Belgium).