On Tuesday, the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine was granted temporary authorization in the UK and dosing will begin next week. The FDA has scheduled an advisory committee meeting for next week, December 8, 9 and 10, for the Pfizer-BioNTech product and potentially could grant approval on December 10, or within a few days afterward. The Moderna’s advisory committee meeting is scheduled for December 17.
The companies, including AstraZeneca-University of Oxford, which is running a close third, as well as the numerous others who have COVID-19 vaccines in development, have astonished skeptics by the speed with which they have developed vaccines that appear to be safe and effective. But now comes an even more daunting challenge—scaling up manufacturing and distribution to deliver the vaccine to populations around the world in a timely and effective manner.
In November, Pfizer and BioNTech had indicated it expected to transport half the COVID-19 vaccine it had originally planned for the year. That didn’t go quite as hoped.
“Scaling up the raw material supply chain took longer than expected,” a company spokeswoman told The Wall Street Journal. “And it’s important to highlight that the outcome of the clinical trial was somewhat later than the initial projection.”
Pfizer-BioNTech had original plans to roll out 100 million vaccines globally by the end of this year, but are now saying 50 million. They still believe they can manufacture more than a billion doses in 2021, enough for about 500 million people.
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a href="https://www.biospace.com/article/covid-19-vaccine-approval-is-one-challenge-manufacturing-and-distribution-quite-another/">Pfizer & BioNTech Experience Early Vaccine Shipping and Distribution Hiccups | BioSpace
