President Biden’s coronavirus response team learned two things in his first week in office: Johnson & Johnson’s unique coronavirus vaccine was highly effective, but the company kept millions of doses behind its production program. .
Preliminary talks that began under the Trump administration about a vaccine-making partnership between the pharmaceutical giant and its competitor, Merck, whose own vaccination attempt had failed, were “incremental” and were going nowhere quickly. according to two senior administration officials. And Johnson & Johnson seemed reluctant to commit to a large-scale deal with Merck, officials said.
“They just weren’t all there,” one official told CNN.
That changed when Jeff Zients, the tsar of the White House coronavirus, called Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky on a Sunday in early February and urged the company to know the time, stressing that the United States they are in a “national emergency” and it was time to go “big and bold.”
“You can’t be small and growing in your thinking. We have to overwhelm this problem,” said a senior administration official, who recounted the conversation, which lasted an hour longer than the scheduled 15 minutes.
Zients reminded Gorsky — a West Point graduate and U.S. military veteran — of Johnson & Johnson’s major contributions during World War II, including the manufacture of the first adhesive tape and other military supplies. Just as Americans remembered Johnson & Johnson’s contributions, their efforts to speed up vaccination of Americans would be their new legacy, according to Zients, according to two senior officials.
“This was really a turning point,” one official said, noting that Gorsky “took” the approach and discussions about a large-scale partnership with Merck became more serious.
Staying on top of this conversation and others between Biden administration officials and executives from both companies was Biden’s authority under the Defense Production Act to force companies to partner if they didn’t want to. A senior administration official said the authority was never explicitly threatened in talks with both companies, but added that it was implicitly a motivating factor.
“The DPA is always there, implicitly as a tool, bringing people to the table and putting people on their feet,” the official said.
The administration would have been willing to invoke DPA coercive authorities if the two companies had not reached an agreement, but it would not have been necessary, the official said. Instead, Biden is exercising other authorities under the DPA to invest $ 105 million to help Merck refurbish its manufacturing facilities to produce the vaccine on a large scale and to accelerate the supply of key materials for vaccine production. and Johnson & Johnson.
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