US Trying To Secure More Doses of Pfizer Vaccine – FT

The U.S. government is trying to secure 100 million additional doses of Pfizer Inc’s coronavirus vaccine, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the order.

Operation Warp Speed (OWS), the government program to accelerate vaccine development, is offering help to increase production of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and German partner BioNTech, the FT reported.

The Pfizer vaccine is awaiting emergency use authorization in the United States after a panel of outside advisers to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to endorse emergency use.

The United States has already ordered 100 million doses of the two-dose vaccine.

OWS is trying to help Pfizer obtain more raw material under the Defense Production Act, so the company can produce the extra doses by June 2021, FT’s sources said.

Pfizer and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

(Reporting by Manas Mishra in Bengaluru; Editing by Vinay Dwivedi)