President Biden’s coronavirus response team learned two things in its first week in office: Johnson & Johnson’s one-shot coronavirus vaccine was extremely effective – but the company exceeded its production schedule by millions of doses.
Preliminary talks that began under the Trump administration about a vaccine-making partnership between the pharmaceutical giant and its competitor, Merck, whose vaccination attempt failed, were “incremental” and going nowhere quickly, according to two senior government officials. . Johnson & Johnson also seemed reluctant to enter into a large-scale deal with Merck, officials said.
“There just weren’t all of them,” one of the officials told CNN.
That changed when Jeff Zients, the White House coronavirus tsar, called Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky on Sunday in early February and asked the company to meet with the moment, stressing that the United States is in a ” national emergency ”and that it is time. to go “big and bold”.
“You can’t be small and small in your thinking. We have to overwhelm this problem,” said a senior administration official, recounting the conversation, which lasted an hour longer than the scheduled 15 minutes.
Zients reminded Gorsky – a West Point graduate and American military veteran – of Johnson & Johnson’s major contributions during World War II, including the manufacture of the first adhesive tape and other military supplies. As the Americans remembered Johnson & Johnson’s contributions then, his efforts to speed up the vaccination of Americans would be their new legacy, Zients said, according to two senior officials.
“This was indeed a turning point,” said one official, noting that Gorsky “embraced” the approach and talks about a large-scale partnership with Merck quickly became more serious.
The suspension of that conversation and others between Biden administration officials and directors of both companies was the authority of Biden under the Defense Production Act to compel companies to associate if they did not wish to. A senior government 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, that brings people to the table and puts people on their feet,” the official said.
The administration would have been willing to invoke the coercive authorities of the DPA if the two companies had not reached an agreement, but it would not have been necessary, the official said. Instead, Biden is exercising other DPA authorities to invest $ 105 million to help Merck upgrade its production facilities to produce the vaccine on a scale and accelerate the supply of key vaccine production materials to Johnson & Johnson.
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