A health worker holds a bottle of Modern COVID-19 vaccine on the first day that Orange County residents, age 65 and older, can be vaccinated at a location at the Orange County Convention Center on December 29, 2020, in Orlando, Florida.
Paul Hennessy | NurPhoto | Getty Images
Moderna is increasing its production of Covid-19 vaccine this year, increasing the minimum number of doses it expects to make by 20% to 600 million, the company announced on Monday.
The company said it is working to produce up to 1 billion doses of its Covid-19 vaccine this year. The United States is on track to deliver 100 million doses of Modern vaccine by the end of March and another 100 million by June, the Massachusetts company said in a statement.
The US Food and Drug Administration granted emergency authorization for the Coverna-19 Moderna vaccine to people over the age of 18 in the United States in December and began launching the drug.
The federal government has agreed to buy 200 million doses of Modern vaccine with the option to provide another 300 million doses, the company said.
The modern Covid-19 vaccine, which uses a new mRNA technology and requires two doses given four weeks apart, has also been approved for use in Canada for people over the age of 18. The company has agreed to provide Canada with 40 million doses of vaccine with the option to supply another 16 million.
“Our effectiveness in providing early supply to the US and Canadian governments and our ability to increase basic production estimates for 2021 are both signals that increasing mRNA vaccine production is a success,” said Juan Andres, head of technical operations at Moderna . .
The US government in the Trump administration’s Warp Speed operation has said it will distribute just under 6 million doses of Moderna vaccine following the FDA’s emergency use authorization.
The launch of the vaccine nationally was slower than originally planned. So far, the United States has distributed just over 13 million doses of vaccine, but has administered only 4.2 million “gunshots,” according to data updated Saturday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Officials aimed to vaccinate 20 million people with the two-dose Cff-19 vaccines Pfizer and Moderna by the end of December.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar defended the distribution of the operation’s vaccine on the ABC show “Good Morning America” on Monday. He said there was a gap between when doses were first available, ordered by states and then delivered, which was slowed by the holidays.
However, the US has seen a “rapid absorption” of the vaccine in recent days, Azar said.
“What I said was that our goal was, in fact, to have 20 the first million doses available in December. They are available, “Azar said. It is not clear what Azar meant when he said the doses are” available “because only 13 million were distributed in America on Saturday morning.