US Launches Plan to Increase COVID-19 Vaccine Production

The US government will make billions of dollars available to pharmaceutical companies to increase production of COVID-19 vaccines, hoping to increase capacity to produce an additional 1 billion injections each year to share with the rest. of the world.

Under the new initiative, the Biomedical Research and Development Authority of the Department of Health and Human Services will request pharmaceutical companies that have demonstrated the ability to produce mRNA vaccines to apply for public investment to increase their manufacturing capacity. In the United States, the companies Pfizer and Modern they are the two that produce mRNA vaccines.

The government estimates that increasing manufacturing capacity will help alleviate a global vaccine shortage, especially in low- and middle-income nations, which in turn will prevent deaths and the emergence of more dangerous variants of the virus.

The initiative comes at a time when the government of President Joe Biden is under pressure, both nationally and internationally, due to unequal access to vaccines. These are times when many Americans are receiving their booster shots while in many poor nations, the majority of the population has not even received their first dose.

Agreements with Moderna or Pfizer have not yet been finalized, but the US government hopes that the support to the facilities, equipment, training and personnel of the companies will result in a greater manufacturing capacity and that by mid-2022 there will be enough doses to share with other countries and to prepare for the next global health emergency.

The announcement was released by an official in President Biden’s administration who spoke on condition of anonymity as he was not authorized to speak about it prior to the official announcement. The news was first reported by The New York Times.