Vaccine Capacity Musical Chairs

By Devan Patel, Senior Director, Project Management

Last week Moderna announced that their COVID-19 vaccine candidate is estimated to be 94.5% effective in clinical trial. This comes a week after we received similarly good news from Pfizer on their vaccine candidate. In the past six months, I’ve spoken to more vaccine developers than I have in the previous eight years, all of them searching for production capacity. From the developer’s perspective it is like global musical chairs. For those non-COVID-19 vaccine developers, the priority given to the pandemic has created tenuous conditions for their own vaccine production. Many are concerned that they will be affected if manufacturing capacity they are counting on is used, understandably so, for COVID-19 vaccine production.