US to pay Pfizer nearly $2bn for COVID-19 vaccine supply
Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech will receive nearly $2 billion from the US in exchange for the supply of 100 million doses of an experimental coronavirus vaccine.
The agreement, announced yesterday, July 22, is part of President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed vaccine programme. The operation aims to deliver 300 million doses of a safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine by January 2021.
In order to receive the sum, Pfizer must obtain approval or emergency use authorisation from the US Food and Drug Administration.
Under the deal, Americans will receive the vaccine for free, and the US government is also able to acquire an additional 500 million doses, although it's unclear what those would cost.
US Health and human services secretary Alex Azar said that expanding Operation Warp Speed’s portfolio by adding a vaccine from Pfizer and BioNTech “increases the odds that we will have a safe, effective vaccine as soon as the end of this year”.
Days earlier, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that they had agreed to supply 30 million doses of the vaccine candidate to the UK, subject to clinical success and regulatory approval.
Financial details of the agreement weren’t disclosed, but the terms are based on the timing of delivery and the volume of doses.
If the companies’ ongoing studies are successful, they expect to be ready to seek conditional marketing authorisation or some form of regulatory approval as early as October 2020.
Pfizer and BioNTech currently expect to manufacture globally up to 100 million doses by the end of 2020 and potentially more than 1.3 billion doses by the end of 2021.
The US Department of Defence also partnered with Germany-based Evotec earlier this week. In a contract valued up to $18.2 million, Evotec’s Seattle-based subsidiary will develop and manufacture monoclonal antibodies for the treatment and/or prevention of COVID-19.
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