White House reportedly turned down additional Pfizer vaccine purchase over the summer
The U.S. doesn't have enough COVID-19 vaccine doses to go around — but it reportedly could've had 100 million more.
This summer, countries began reserving millions of doses of coronavirus vaccine candidates. Pfizer's vaccine has proven one of the most viable of that lot, and the Department of Health and Human Service purchased 100 million doses of the two-shot vaccine back in July. But HHS could have doubled that supply and decided against it, people familiar with the matter tell The New York Times.
After HHS' initial purchase of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, Pfizer approached American officials again later in the summer to offer up another 100 million doses, per the Times. U.S. officials reportedly turned them down, leaving Pfizer to sell its doses to other countries. Now, it may not be able to offer any additional doses to the U.S. until June, the Times reports. That means the U.S. has only reserved enough of the Pfizer vaccine to vaccinate 50 million Americans. And that will likely be down to just 25 million by the end of the year, as Pfizer said last week it would only be able to deliver half of its promised doses this month.
One possible explanation for the rejection is that the White House thought it would have enough doses if every developer had delivered an effective vaccine; Project Warp Speed does have purchase agreements with five other coronavirus vaccine developers. But beyond the 100 million doses it purchased from Moderna, most of those other candidates just aren't viable yet. It's possible that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, of which the U.S. reserved 400 million doses, will pull through, but it has so far proven less effective than Pfizer and Moderna's candidates.
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