COVID-19 Vaccine – A Missed Opportunity

Under Operation Warp Speed, the government agreed to pay vaccine makers to produce vaccines ahead of approval to remove some of the financial risk, and get the vaccine produced as quickly as possible. It included a contract with Pfizer and its German partner, BioNTech, to produce 100 million doses of vaccine. Since each person requires two doses, that would be enough to vaccinate 50 million people.

As just reported by the New York Times, the Trump administration passed up the opportunity to buy additional doses late this summer, preferring to rely on other vaccines, having made 6 contracts to hedge their bet.

On 11/11/20 the European Union announced a deal to purchase 200 million doses from Pfizer/BioNTech, and the option to buy an additional 100 million doses. They said they may not be able to produce more for the United States until June as they now have other contracts. President Trump just issued an executive order prioritizing distribution to Americans, but I don’t think that is likely to have the force of law behind it.

Moderna has also applied for emergency approval of their vaccine. They said they expect to produce 85 to 100 million doses for the United States in the first quarter of next year. That would be enough for up to 50 million people.

So far that would get us enough to vaccinate up to 100 million people in this country by the end of March, assuming the companies are able to produce it at that rate. To put that in perspective, that’s only about 1/3 of the population. In addition, producing enough vaccine is only half the story. It then has to be distributed, and injected into people’s arms, which is a difficult challenge.

The Trump administration said that they turned down the option to purchase more vaccine because they are counting on other vaccines. Although they may come through, it seems like it was a big missed opportunity. The worse case scenario would have been we had more vaccine than we needed (well the worst would be that it turned out that the vaccine was either not effective or not safe). Think of the good will we could have earned by donating millions of doses, at a cost of only $39 to give two doses to each person. That’s a small price to pay to prevent a lot of illness, death, and damage to the economy.