Dr. Scott Gottlieb, who sits on Pfizer’s board of directors, defended the company’s decision to send fewer vials of the Covid-19 vaccine and count six doses per vial, instead of five, saying it is the best way to make sure used.
When the company began shipping vials of its vaccine last month, pharmacists discovered they could often extract an additional dose from each vial that, on paper, contained only five doses. That discovery meant the United States could get more doses of the vaccine than the $ 200 million the Department of Defense bought with its contract with Pfizer.
“The bottom line here is that this is a very scarce resource. We need to make sure every dose is used,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday. “The only way to do that is to market it as a six-dose vial and provide the right equipment to extract that sixth dose, which is what Pfizer is actually doing.”
The New York Times reported Friday that Pfizer executives have successfully pushed Food and Drug Administration officials in recent weeks to review the wording of the vaccine’s emergency use authorization to count formally the sixth dose in his federal contract.
Some pharmacists were confused about the extra doses or did not have the proper syringes to extract them and threw them out.
“During this pandemic, with the number of people dying around the world, it is critical that we use the full supply of available vaccines and vaccinate as many people as possible. To leave an extra dose in each vial, it could be used to vaccinate more. people, it would be a tragedy, ”company spokeswoman Amy Rose said.
Gottlieb told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday that the measure would help the United States speed up the distribution of vaccine doses, adding that Pfizer can now supply 120 million doses of the vaccine in the first quarter of 2021. compared to 100 million before the label change.
But the move puts pressure on American pharmacists to extract six doses from each vial, which requires special syringes, called syringes with little dead space. The U.S. government, which sends kits that include syringes along with doses of the vaccine, has contracted with syringe manufacturers such as Becton Dickinson, the world’s largest syringe maker, to supply supplies to local officials.
But Becton Dickinson does not have the capacity to substantially increase the supply of syringes to the United States, Reuters reported earlier Monday, and questioned how many vials could extract six doses from the U.S..
Gottlieb said the vaccines will only count as six-dose vials in which local jurisdictions also receive the appropriate syringes to extract the last dose.
Gottlieb noted that when Pfizer applied for emergency use of his vaccine, he knew that six doses could be extracted from each vial, but the review of the wording of the application would have delayed the vaccine authorization. Thus, the company went ahead and requested authorization with the intention of revising the wording later to reflect the six-dose vials.
He added that the US FDA took longer than regulatory agencies in other countries to make the change. He said authorities in the UK, Switzerland and Israel had already reviewed the wording of their Pfizer vaccine permits to reflect that each vial contains six doses.
Gottlieb, the former head of the FDA, clarified that the change will not be applied retroactively, meaning that all previously shipped vials are counted as five-dose containers.
But “at some point, you had to make the accommodation to properly account for the doses,” Gottlieb said.
Outreach: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC contributor and a member of Pfizer’s genetic testing start-up boards Tempus, a health technology company Aetion Inc. and Illumina biotechnology company. He is also co-chair of the Healthy Sail Panel of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Royal Caribbean.