A Pfizer executive said he and the company were “confident” in its ability to deliver 2 billion doses of Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year in an interview with the Associated Press on Sunday.
“Right now, we can deliver approximately 2 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2021,” Mike McDermott, president of global supply at Pfizer, told AP.
“We are confident in this commitment, but of course we are constantly looking for ways to make and distribute more doses faster,” he added.
McDermott, who has worked at Pfizer for 30 years, said in his interview that the company is working to increase the efficiency of vaccine development through methods that include adding more production lines, using contract manufacturers and doubling batch sizes.
“There is an extreme need to vaccinate more people quickly,” he said. “We are expanding our capacity to make as many vaccines as possible.”
The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine became the first approved in the United States in December. But since then, more contagious variants of COVID-19, first discovered in the UK and South Africa, have made their way to the US, raising concerns about the current effectiveness of vaccines against strains.
McDermott said Pfizer’s construction of the virus’s messenger RNA genetic code is “the perfect science to be able to make changes quickly,” if necessary.
“In essence, there would be no changes to the production network,” he said. “This genetically modified material will enter the system – and production will begin immediately with a new version of the vaccine.”
Pfizer-BioNTech is one of two vaccines, along with the Moderna vaccine, approved for emergency use in the United States, both requiring two doses.
More than 27.2 million doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine have been administered in the country, compared to more than 25.5 million doses of Moderna vaccine, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Meanwhile, the CDC has documented itself 981 cases of the variant first found in the UK in 37 states and 13 cases of the variant first discovered in South Africa in five states.
Early data indicated that Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine may help protect against mutations in these two variants.