Bloomberg Businessweek
Pfizer deserves every bit
of the credit it’s receiving.
But should a drug company
decide who gets a shot?
By Stephanie Baker, Cynthia
Koons, and Vernon Silver
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March 8, 2021
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ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS NOSENZO
VACCINE CAPITALISM
I
48
t’s not every day that a head of government goes to the
airport to greet a cargo shipment, but the pandemic
has changed many things. On Jan. 10, Israeli Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu motorcaded to Ben Gurion
International Airport, southeast of Tel Aviv, to watch a shipment of 700,000 vaccine doses from Pfizer Inc. emerge from a
blue-and-white El Al Boeing 787-9.
“This is a great day for the state of Israel, with a huge shipment that has arrived,” Netanyahu said, exuding a confidence few world leaders have mustered since the crisis began.
“I agreed with my friend, Pfizer Chairman and CEO Albert
Bourla, that we would bring shipment after shipment and
complete the vaccination of the over-16 population in Israel
during the month of March.”
Bourla had thrown Netanyahu a political lifeline. Faced with
surging Covid-19 cases and an election in March, the prime minister latched on to Pfizer’s vaccine as his best hope to stay in
office. Standing on the tarmac, he bragged that 72% of Israelis
over the age of 60 had already been vaccinated, thanks to
shipments that began in early December, and that more doses
would come soon. That was because he’d struck a deal with
Bourla to use his country as a test case for Pfizer’s vaccine.
Vaccine distribution still has the feel of a zero-sum game.
Five days after Netanyahu’s victory lap, Pfizer told other nonU.S. customers that it would cut near-term supplies while it
briefly closed its vaccine manufacturing facility in Belgium
for an upgrade.
Panic and anger rippled through world capitals, nowhere
more so than in Rome. Italy, which has suffered one of the
highest Covid death rates and which had successfully set up
a mass vaccination program and inoculated more people than
any other European Union country, was waiting for new doses
when Pfizer announced the cuts. The country’s virus emergency czar at the time, Domenico Arcuri, lashed out, complaining that Pfizer had cut its shipments by almost 30% just
as Italy was about to start vaccinating people older than 80
en masse. He warned that Italy could take unspecified action
against the company.
Days after Arcuri aired his grievances, Pfizer began shipping millions of doses to Israel. Within a week, Israel expanded
its rollout to include 16- to 18-year-olds.
“Look, we are very angry,” Luca Zaia, president of Italy’s
Veneto region—one of the areas most affected by Covid, with
more than 9,800 deaths—told reporters, sitting in front of EU
and Italian flags. He’d recently learned that supplies to his
region would be cut 53% for that week. “I want to understand
what Nobel Prize winner they paid to organize the distribution,
or which principle or algorithm they used.”
It didn’t come from some algorithm. The vaccine allocation
was the product of a company struggling to apportion doses
while demand far exceeded supply, using an opaque process
that appears to have involved a mix of order size, position in
the queue, production forecasts, calls from world leaders,
the potential to advance the science, and of course the desire
to make a profit. “Everybody wanted [deliveries] in the first
March 8, 2021
quarter, and we tried to allow discussions and negotiations to
spread things so everybody would get in an equitable base,”
Bourla says. The countries that hadn’t placed orders wanted a
place in line, and those that had placed early orders wanted to
buy more. “It was a constant negotiation,” he says. “Everybody
wanted it of course earlier.” Pfizer says the agreement with
Israel didn’t affect doses going elsewhere.
Israel had two things going for it: Netanyahu had offered
to pay roughly $30 a dose, about 50% more than the U.S. government, according to people familiar with the deal. He also
agreed to share countrywide data on the vaccine, a two-dose
product based on an experimental platform called messenger RNA, or mRNA. It’s
being used almost exclusively
in Israel, in what amounts to
a large-scale effectiveness
study. (Pfizer considered
offering the same arrangeHealth Minister Yuri Edelstein and
ment to Iceland, but the
Netanyahu welcome a shipment of vaccines
country didn’t have enough
at Ben Gurion Airport on Jan. 10
Covid cases to make a study
meaningful.) By Feb. 22, Israel had given first doses to 47% of
its 9 million people, making it the world leader. Italy, meanwhile, had administered first shots to 3.6% of its citizens.
Bourla says the agreement with Israel will provide data that
will transform the world’s understanding of how to end the
pandemic. “They are trying to extract the scientific information that the whole world is waiting on right now,” he says.
“We’ll get data on symptomatic and asymptomatic transmission very quickly.” Indeed, the news out of Israel on Feb. 24
was remarkable: The vaccine prevented 94% of Covid cases in
almost 600,000 vaccinated people.
As the first company to develop an authorized Covid vaccine, which it did in partnership with Germany’s BioNTech SE,
Pfizer wields enormous power. Bourla had been Pfizer’s chief
executive officer only a year when the pandemic began and
almost immediately faced choices no pharma executive would
normally be making. Government policy matters, as does the
behavior of individuals, but to some degree vaccine makers
determine where infections will decrease and which economies will reopen first. Their customers are elected national
leaders who’ve designed intricate vaccination programs with
public-health officials, but those leaders are learning they’re at
the mercy of what manufacturers such as Pfizer deliver.
In the past few months, Bourla has taken on an almost statesmanlike role, holding calls with heads of state, including former U.S. President Donald Trump, European Commission
President Ursula von der Leyen, and Canadian Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau. Netanyahu boasted in January that he’d spoken
with Bourla 17 times, with the CEO even taking his calls at 2 a.m.
Bourla says he’s talked to Netanyahu “even more” since then.
Pfizer’s first-out-of-the-gate status has also offered Bourla a
sales opportunity like none other. He’s locked in orders from
more than 60 countries on undisclosed commercial terms.
MOTTI MILLROD/REUTERS
Bloomberg Businessweek
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Pfizer has supplied 95 million doses globally. It’s executing on
one of the most ambitious scale-ups in pharmaceutical history
to meet the relentless demand, boosting production to 2 billion
doses in 2021—more than it has agreements to sell at this stage. It
expects the vaccine to generate at least $15 billion in revenue in
2021, putting it—under the brand name Comirnaty, an ungainly
blend of “Covid,” “mRNA,” and “immunity”—on track to be one
of the biggest-selling drugs in the world.
There’s no rulebook for how a global corporation should
behave during a pandemic. Pfizer accomplished something
extraordinary, exceeding nearly everyone’s hopes, and is now
doing what pharma does: mass-marketing lifesaving products
at prices the market is willing to pay. It’s not bound to serve a
global public-health agenda. All that said, there will one day be
an autopsy of the pandemic, and a central question might be
how a single company came to hold such power over so many.
I
n May 2020 the Trump administration announced the
launch of Operation Warp Speed. Moncef Slaoui, a former GlaxoSmithKline Plc executive, joined as chief
adviser to OWS to figure out which vaccines to back. He had
an uncommon familiarity with mRNA technology from serving
on the board of Moderna Inc., which had spent years researching the platform. No drug using mRNA technology had ever
been approved.
Slaoui knew Pfizer might be a contender after it announced
its decision to collaborate with BioNTech, another mRNA pioneer, but he didn’t know Bourla. When they first spoke, in June
2020, Bourla made it clear he wasn’t interested in taking money
for research and development as the other companies OWS was
evaluating were. Instead, he wanted an advance purchase order
from OWS to guarantee a buyer if Pfizer succeeded. The company’s $50 billion in annual revenue meant it could afford to take a
flier. Bourla has said it wasn’t an easy decision, but he felt it liberated scientists from bureaucracy to get faster results. “Albert
was very clear that they had what it takes to deliver,” Slaoui says.
Pfizer’s confidence showed early on. It began marketing
the vaccine globally in May, soon after it started safety testing. “The process started in the very early days when we
reached out to every single country,” Bourla says. “We started
discussions in all continents of the world.” The U.K. was the
first country to do a deal, agreeing on July 20 to buy 30 million doses (later upped to 40 million) to be delivered in 2020
and 2021. As with most of Pfizer’s deals with individual countries, the terms were not disclosed.
Pfizer executives found a partial
fix to their supply problem
in the vaccine vials themselves.
They just needed authorization
to say the vials contained
six doses instead of five
March 8, 2021
Two days later, Pfizer announced a $1.95 billion order from
Operation Warp Speed for 100 million doses, pending authorization of its vaccine from the Food and Drug Administration.
The straight advance-purchase order set Pfizer apart from
all the other OWS candidates. Moderna, for example, got
$2.48 billion from the U.S. government, including $955 million
for clinical development and manufacturing and payment for
100 million doses. By contrast, Pfizer has spent $2 billion of its
own money on development. Company executives came out
of the gate asking for a higher price per dose than the $19.50
they eventually agreed on, according to former senior administration officials who declined to be named because the discussions were confidential.
Higher prices were floated in Europe, too. Last summer,
Pfizer and BioNTech started off asking for €54 ($65) a dose in
negotiations with the EU, a person familiar with the talks says,
confirming German media reports. BioNTech co-founder Ugur
Sahin told Bild that initial ballpark figures were based on rough
calculations of production costs before they figured out how
the manufacturing would work. They later settled on a range
of €15 to €30 a dose for “industrialized countries,” depending on order size.
Free from the strings attached by a government grant, Pfizer
could move faster. “We made the early decision to begin clinical
work and large-scale manufacturing at our own risk to ensure
that product would be available immediately if our clinical trials
prove successful,” Bourla said when announcing the U.S. deal.
Less than a week after securing the U.S. contract, Pfizer started
its final-stage trial, saying it aimed to seek regulatory review
by the FDA as early as October. Moderna started its final trial
the same day, but a longer interval between doses—28 days to
Pfizer’s 21—meant that, all other things being equal, Pfizer was
positioned to report results first.
The orders kept rolling in. A few days after the trial started,
Japan ordered 120 million doses to be delivered in the first half
of 2021. In early August, Canada made a deal.
In late August, Pfizer shared early data showing that participants generated a strong immune response to the vaccine, and
even more countries got in line. In early September the company agreed to “potentially supply” the EU with as many as
300 million doses, but the bloc dragged its feet on finalizing the
deal. The Gulf state of Qatar placed an order a few weeks later.
Bourla had been consistently saying the company
expected to report results from the final-stage trial by the
end of October, which Trump seized on as he sagged in the
polls in the homestretch of his reelection campaign. “We’re
going to have a vaccine very soon. Maybe even before a very
special date,” Trump said in early September. Concern that
Pfizer was rushing the trial at the expense of safety checks
mounted. Pushing back at the perception that the Trump
administration was pressuring the company, Bourla promised to make safety paramount. “I wanted to speak directly
to the billions of people, millions of businesses, and hundreds of governments around the world that are investing
their hopes in a safe and effective Covid-19 vaccine,” he
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50
said in an open letter. “The vaccine must be proven safe.”
Pfizer ruffled feathers with some inside Operation Warp
Speed. The company had been pushing for the U.S. government to place an additional order of 100 million doses, but
OWS officials were wary. The company was already failing to
meet its production targets for November, for reasons that
were unclear, according to the former senior administration officials. Pfizer says it kept the government informed
about production.
When Pfizer announced the results of its final-stage trial six
days after the election, the news was huge: The vaccine was
more than 90% effective at preventing Covid symptoms. Slaoui
says Bourla called him right before Pfizer issued a news release
at 6:45 a.m. on Nov. 9, and he was so excited that he had to
refrain from shouting for fear of waking up other guests in his
hotel in Washington. Nevertheless, amid the euphoria was some
bad news: Pfizer warned that it would be able to produce only
50 million doses worldwide by the end of the year, instead of
the 100 million it had projected.
Pfizer was running into major production problems at its
1,300-acre campus in Kalamazoo, Mich., where the company
set up a freezer farm the size of a football field to store doses
at the required -75C (-103F). Scaling up manufacturing of a new
product with a new technology required a steady flow of raw
materials. It turned out Pfizer needed the government’s help
after all. To clear supply chain holdups, company executives
were pressing Warp Speed for an order under the Defense
Production Act, which would give it priority access to suppliers. Other OWS candidates had been taking advantage of
the DPA for months. OWS hesitated. The administration officials say they were worried that Pfizer would use its size and
market clout to muscle out Moderna in the supply chain if it
got equivalent status under the DPA.
Pfizer’s production holdups had a huge impact on the U.S.
vaccine rollout. Before the trial results were announced, OWS
had been expecting 20 million doses in November and 20 million in December. Instead it got nothing in November and
20 million doses in December, some of them flown in from
Pfizer’s production site in Belgium, to make up for the gaps
from Kalamazoo.
The U.K., which was the first country to authorize the vaccine, on Dec. 2, had been expecting 10 million doses by the
end of the year but got about half that. Despite the supply challenges, Pfizer announced right before Christmas that it had
agreed to supply the U.S. with another 100 million doses. At
the same time, government officials finally agreed to provide
the company with priority under the DPA.
In late December a flurry of news stories from the Middle
East revealed that Pfizer had contracted to sell millions of
doses to countries in previously unreported deals. Dubai
got its first doses flown in from Belgium and announced it
would aim to inoculate 70% of its 3.3 million people with the
Pfizer vaccine. Officials in Saudi Arabia told TV b
roadcaster
Al Arabiya they were expecting 3 million Pfizer doses, with a
third of those to be delivered by the end of February. Oman
March 8, 2021
ordered 370,000, paying $30 a shot for early supplies arriving
in December and $24 a shot for later shipments, the health
minister told a government news outlet. This appeared to be
one of the highest prices outside Israel, though lack of disclosure makes it impossible to say for sure.
Pfizer executives found a partial fix to their supply p
roblem
in the vaccine vials themselves. They just needed authorization to change the labels to say the vials contained six doses
instead of five. It’s standard practice in the p
harmaceutical
industry to overfill vials slightly to avoid running the risk of
undershooting and violating FDA labeling laws. Pfizer was
overfilling each vial by just enough for an extra dose if vaccinators used what are called low dead-volume syringes.
But not all vaccination sites had the syringes. Moreover, the
company’s application to the FDA and other regulators specified five-dose vials. Pfizer needed to generate data showing
the extra shot could be reliably extracted.
The company did that and then began pressing FDA officials to change the authorization to recognize the sixth dose.
OWS officials were against the change, anticipating nightmare
logistical implications right when they were starting the biggest mass vaccination campaign in U.S. history, the former
senior administration officials say. Pfizer’s vaccine needed
to be kept at subarctic temperatures—it was already difficult
enough to distribute without last-minute rejiggering. (Recently
the FDA announced that it can be kept at normal freezer temperatures for up to two weeks.)
The company’s lobbying efforts succeeded. On Jan. 6 the
FDA revised its fact sheet, allowing the sixth dose and effectively boosting Pfizer’s production by 20%. Regulators in
Europe, the U.K., and elsewhere followed suit. The U.S. and
the U.K. had managed to source the syringes, but other countries were left scrambling. Sweden and Japan complained they
didn’t have enough special syringes to extract the sixth dose
and warned it would likely mean millions of doses would be
thrown away. Austria was also short of supplies.
Bourla defended the policy change by saying the company
VACCINE POLITICS
Daily first doses administered in Italy and Israel
◼ Under 30 ◼ 30-59 ◼ 60 and over
Italy
1/10/212/10/21
Israel
80k
80k
40
40
0
0
1/10/212/10/21
DATA: GOVERNMENT REPORTS
Bloomberg Businessweek
“When there is a suggestion of
death and life, when there is
a question of the global economy,
the demand will always be bigger.
You will get complaints”
had validated 36 syringe-needle combinations that could get the
extra dose out. “It would be criminal if we can use six doses,
and we are throwing away one vaccine that can save lives right
now,” he told Bloomberg in late January.
The modification was a huge win for Pfizer. The company
had promised to supply the U.S. with 100 million doses by the
end of the first quarter, and it now says it can provide 120 million. Because nations pay by the dose, the move also delivered
an instant 20% price hike per vial.
W
hen Bourla took the helm at Pfizer in January 2019,
his mission was to get the company to focus on blockbuster drugs and to fend off a potential battle with
the Trump administration over drug pricing. The coronavirus
immediately gave him a new focus. Pfizer’s little-known partnership with a German biotech turned it into a hero of the
pandemic. There was considerable doubt that mRNA vaccines
would work, but Bourla’s willingness to gamble on the new
technology paid off.
While Israel was swimming in Pfizer vaccines in late January,
other countries were struggling to find out when their deliveries would resume. On Jan. 8 the EU said it had doubled its order
by securing the purchase of another 300 million doses. A week
later, Pfizer announced the supply cut and the Belgian shutdown. Within days, it informed officials in Canada—which had
recently doubled its order to 40 million shots—that the country would receive no doses the following week. Prime Minister
Trudeau spoke with Bourla on Jan. 21, but the call didn’t unlock
additional supplies. Desperate for doses, he agreed to take
vaccines from Covax, the facility backed by the World Health
Organization to provide 2 billion doses to low-income countries. Canada was the only Group of Seven country to do so.
Opposition politicians accused him of grabbing doses meant
for countries that couldn’t afford to do bilateral deals.
Bahrain, Dubai, and Saudi Arabia also reported delays
in shipments. “Pfizer supply has been a global challenge,”
Amer Sharif, head of Dubai’s Covid-19 Command and Control
Centre, told Bloomberg TV. “There have been a lot of discussions with Pfizer representatives in the region.” Oman was cut,
too. “Do not panic,” Ahmed bin Mohammed al-Saidi, Oman’s
health minister, urged at a press conference on Feb. 1. “We
were assured that the next consignment will be here before
the middle of this month.”
The Gulf states have weathered the delays without major
consequences, because their rates of infection are relatively
March 8, 2021
low. Mexico, with surging cases and the world’s third-highest
number of deaths, has felt Pfizer’s supply cut more profoundly. Having agreed in early December to buy 34 million
Pfizer doses, the nation started vaccinating in late December,
the first country to do so in Latin America. Then Pfizer’s shipments stopped for three weeks, until roughly 500,000 doses
for health-care workers arrived in mid-February. It hadn’t even
started vaccinating the elderly. On Feb. 2, Mexican Foreign
Minister Marcelo Ebrard criticized Pfizer for holding back
doses “that are already signed and paid for.”
The world was waiting for Pfizer to retool its sprawling
facility, the size of several sports stadiums, on the outskirts
of the tiny Belgian town of Puurs. Last year, Pfizer hired several hundred more staff, bringing the total to more than 3,000,
as it geared up for production. That wasn’t enough to keep
up with the crush of orders. The partial closure of the plant
lasted almost two weeks.
“When there is a question of death and life, when there is a
question of the global economy, the demand will always be bigger,” Bourla says. “You will get complaints.” Pfizer wasn’t alone
in cutting supplies to Europe—AstraZeneca Plc later also fell well
short on its promised deliveries to the EU—but Europe was relying on the American company to start its rollout. “There’s no
doubt in my mind that there is anxiety, there is stress, there is
pressure,” Bourla says. “The voices are becoming louder, and
people will try to find the scapegoats.”
In the Rome region, the Pfizer cuts delayed the vaccine
campaign for people older than 80 by a week, with first shots
administered on Feb. 8. The knock-on effect means some of
the most vulnerable are waiting until spring to get their first
doses. Salvatore Parisi, 94, a retired Rome courthouse clerk,
is sheltering at home until his April 3 appointment at a hospital for his first Pfizer shot, with a second dose scheduled
for April 24. He’s holding out hope that doses might become
available sooner at his family doctor’s office. “Every week we
call. ‘Is there something new?’ ‘No, no,’ ” he says via telephone
to questions relayed by his 79-year-old wife, Maria Sinibaldi,
because his hearing isn’t what it once was. “I’m a little scared
but not too angry. I’m just waiting for a call from my doctor.”
The EU had developed a strategy of pooling vaccine procurement across the 27 member states. It signed supply
deals with six vaccine developers. With Pfizer, the European
Commission agreed to a framework for supplying countries
quarterly, leaving week-to-week decisions to the company
and each nation, says Stefan de Keersmaecker, a commission spokesman. When Pfizer made its cuts in January, that
arrangement led to a patchwork of supply gaps across the
Continent, which caused anger to mount against the drugmaker. A Pfizer spokeswoman said the cuts were made with
the understanding that the Belgian factory revamp would lead
to “significantly increased volumes” before the end of March.
EU member states also agreed not to negotiate bilateral
agreements with drug companies. That didn’t stop Germany
from striking a separate preliminary agreement with BioNTech
for 30 million doses, after it gave the company a €375 million
51
grant in September. (Pfizer is not party to that agreement.)
The EC says it hasn’t seen Germany’s deal, which hasn’t been
finalized. “Parallel negotiations aren’t allowed in our vaccine
strategy,” De Keersmaecker says. “Legally it’s not allowed.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel tried to defuse Europe’s
vaccine crisis by holding a videoconference with commission
officials and drugmakers including Pfizer executives on Feb. 1.
Pfizer says it got back on schedule with the EU at the end of
January. Bourla says countries started getting more doses by
late February.
Striking deals and mass-producing a new vaccine in the
middle of a pandemic was never going to be straightforward.
“This is the fastest any vaccine has been approved and rolled
out, the fastest any vaccine has been mass-administered to
people, the fastest response to a pandemic, and probably the
fastest manufacturing ramp-up ever,” says Jonathan Miller,
an analyst at Evercore ISI. “I don’t think this could have gone
much faster than it did.”
P
52
ublic-health officials have warned that rich c ountries
making deals with companies such as Pfizer will
restrict access to the vaccine for those who can’t
afford price-is-no-object deals. In January, WHO DirectorGeneral Tedros Ghebreyesus criticized bilateral deals and
implored high-income countries to share doses, warning that
“the world is on the brink of a catastrophic moral failure.” It
wasn’t until the end of that month that Bourla announced an
agreement with Covax. The deal, for 40 million doses, represented less than 2% of Pfizer’s projected 2021 production.
Other vaccine developers have come in bigger. AstraZeneca
has committed 170 million doses of its vaccine, while the
Serum Institute of India Pvt Ltd. has agreed to supply 1.1 billion doses of its versions of the AstraZeneca shot and another
vaccine developed by the American company Novavax Inc.,
pending authorization. Covax is also finalizing commitments
for hundreds of millions of additional doses from Johnson &
Johnson and Novavax.
No one in public health says the current global rollout of
Covid vaccines is the best way to beat the pandemic. “In an
ideal world, what we would have had is one global mechanism where manufacturers would have said, ‘We’re all going
to supply one entity,’ and governments said, ‘We’re all going
to procure through one entity,’ ” says Katherine O’Brien, the
WHO’s technical lead on Covax. “It makes much more sense.”
Bourla, of course, doesn’t run a public-health agency. He
answers to his shareholders. Locking in orders early, sometimes at a higher price for those that can afford to pay more,
is what a CEO does. Pfizer has said it expects initial profit
margins in the upper 20% range, which is high for a vaccine.
Moderna has charged more for its shot outside the U.S., but
its limited manufacturing capacity means it’s done a fraction
of the deals Pfizer has, with most deliveries expected only in
the spring. AstraZeneca has struck dozens of bilateral agreements, but it’s promised not to make a profit during the pandemic; it’s selling its shot for a few dollars a dose. If there’s
March 8, 2021
a challenger to Pfizer’s primacy, it might be the recently
authorized vaccine from Johnson & Johnson, which is highly
effective, requires simple refrigeration, and is administered
in a single shot.
For now, though, Pfizer has unparalleled brand awareness,
even if “Comirnaty” doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. (The
name might not even be used in the U.S.; brand names are
established only after full FDA approval.) In late February,
President Joe Biden toured Pfizer’s Michigan plant and reassured the public that the government is working overtime to
get everyone vaccinated. To meet the challenge, Pfizer is continuing to increase production. The company now expects to
be able to ship 13 million doses a week by mid-March, up from
4 million to 5 million a week in early February.
Speaking with investors and analysts after releasing earnings
results in January, Bourla and other Pfizer executives talked
expansively about a post-pandemic world in which the company would be able to charge more for the vaccine. Vaccine
prices are normally about $150 to $175, said Chief Financial
Officer Frank D’Amelio. “We’re in a pandemic pricing environment,” he said. “Obviously we’re going to get more on price.”
With new variants of the coronavirus spreading, the need
for regular booster shots is
highly likely. Pfizer is working on a new vaccine that
can target the South African
mutation of the virus, which
may infect some people
who’ve been vaccinated. The
prospect of the world’s popPresident Biden tours Pfizer’s vaccine plant ulation of almost 8 billion
in Michigan in late February
needing boosters puts Covid
vaccines into an entirely new league. Pfizer expects to be able
to make its vaccine easier to store and ship—it’s working on
a freeze-dried version. The company is preparing for what
Bourla calls an “open market” in which supplies are plentiful
and people can choose which vaccine they want.
“I would feel very comfortable that we will have the lion’s
share of the market, because we are first and we are best,”
Bourla said on his earnings call. “In scenarios that Covid will
move from a pandemic into more of a normal type of vaccination business, it is very clear that Pfizer will have a key
advantage, not only because of the strength of data but also
because we have developed significant brand equity and trust
with the people.”
The shortage will eventually subside. Until then, Bourla
occupies a strange position. He’s a savior, the bold leader
of a company that stepped up. But he promised desperate governments doses he couldn’t deliver on time. As supplies increase, hard feelings may fade, but Bourla’s decisions
during the height of the pandemic will be the subject of study.
There was a vacuum in global leadership. He and his company filled it. The world needs better solutions before the next
public-health crisis comes around. �With Ivan Levingston,
Sylvia Westall, and Naomi Kresge
EVAN VUCCI/AP PHOTO
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