- Pfizer says coronavirus vaccine production will improve considerably as the company has increased manufacturing efficiency.
- The company has reduced the time it takes to manufacture a batch of COVID-19 vaccines to 60 days from the initial average of 110 days.
- Pfizer has also increased production at its three U.S.-based plants involved in the vaccine manufacturing process.
Bloomberg prepares a coronavirus vaccine tracker that calculates how long it will take a particular country or state to achieve herd immunity, or vaccinate 75% of the population. As of Saturday morning, the world needed about 7 years to vaccinate 75% of the population with two-dose vaccines. This represents a rate of more than 4.6 million shots a day. The main problem with COVID-19 vaccine campaigns is that there are simply not enough doses to do so, so most people who are not eligible for early vaccination will have to wait a few months for get your turn. But the number of candidates available for the vaccine is rising as more drugs have completed phase 3 trials in recent weeks.
As for vaccine candidates who were already authorized for emergency use, they increase manufacturing. Now, Pfizer has just confirmed that it is able to increase production significantly.
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The Pfizer and BioNTech partnership was the first to produce an effective and safe candidate vaccine. His drug mRNA was authorized for emergency use in mid-December. The drug is already used in the US, Europe, Israel and other countries, but companies cannot meet the demand. The vaccine includes a two-dose regimen and vaccines should be given at least three weeks apart.
Aside from determining the efficacy and safety of the drug during the trials, Pfizer had to develop new production lines and procedures for a type of drug that had never been made before. Scientists figured out how to make the whole process more efficient and can now reduce the production time of a batch of vaccines from 110 days to 60 days on average.
“We call this‘ Project Light Speed ’and it’s called that for a reason,” Chaz Calitri said USA Today. Calitri is Pfizer’s vice president of sterile injections operations and runs the plant in Kalamazoo, Michigan. “Just in the last month, we’ve doubled production.”
The report explains that the Pfizer vaccine is manufactured on three plants. The process begins in Chesterfield, Missouri, moves to Andover, Massachusetts, and ends in Kalamazoo, Michigan. The production system is based on how the vaccine was developed in the laboratory. With a regular vaccine, engineers would spend years improving efficiency and profitability, but that can’t happen with a candidate vaccine during a pandemic.
“We just went straight into commercial production,” Calitri said. But engineers continued to analyze the production process to improve efficiency. One of the things that the engineers improved was the creation of the DNA material that starts the vaccination process. Initially they needed 16 days for the process, but this time is now reduced to 9 or 10 days. The engineers said so USA Today that FDA regulations and best manufacturing practices are still met despite accelerated deadlines for quality control and testing.
Pfizer has also increased production at all three plants and expects further improvements in the coming months. “We just proved to ourselves that we can go from a phone call in March to having delivered 50 to 60 million doses,” Calitri said.
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Chris Smith began writing about gadgets as a hobby, and before he knew it, he was sharing his views on technology issues with readers around the world. Whenever he doesn’t write about gadgets, he can’t get away from them, even though he tries desperately. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.