Pharmaceutical companies that are racing to develop vaccines for the coronavirus are already working behind the scenes to build the supply chains needed to deliver their drugs to billions of people as rapidly as possible.
To serve global demand once a vaccine is approved, a complicated and high-stakes supply chain would kick into gear on a scale that the drug industry has rarely seen. The preparations involve lining up raw materials and factory capacity to manufacture a vaccine in large volumes, and the equipment needed to transport many millions of doses at once through distribution channels that will be subject to tight security and temperature controls.
The magnitude and speed of the effort creates the potential for lapses at each step that could cost invaluable doses.
Vaccines likely would be sent to hospitals, pharmacies, and central vaccination points, in the same way that medical teams have set up in parking lots, schools and other sites to provide testing for the virus that has, by Johns Hopkins University’s latest count, infected over 16 million people world-wide and killed over 661,000.
“We’ve never had to do something at this scale before,” said Remo Colarusso, vice president of supply chain at Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies, a company owned by Johnson & Johnson that says it is on the verge of clinical trials for a potential vaccine.
U.S. government is getting involved, allocating $10 billion for Operation Warp Speed, an initiative that aims to speed up vaccine development with the objective of distributing 300 million doses of coronavirus vaccine by January 2021. By comparison, drugmakers supplied 174.5 million doses of the flu vaccine between last September and February in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Photo:
Illustration by Thomas Lechleiter/The Wall Street Journal
Lawmakers are considering plans to bolster the vaccine effort with an additional $25 billion. “Once a vaccine has been successfully developed, how do you get all the production you need, and how do you get it out? That is a role we obviously will be playing a part in,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said in July ahead of negotiations in Congress for the next round of coronavirus aid.
The planning comes as developers in several countries are reporting progress.
Three vaccine initiatives—University of Oxford researchers and
PLC;
Pfizer Inc.
; and China’s CanSino Biologics—all said last week their shots generated immune responses and appeared generally safe to use. Earlier this week, there were 25 potential vaccines in clinical evaluation and 139 in preclinical evaluation, according to the WHO.
Shoring up manufacturing, distribution channels
Some of the companies involved are building this supply chain for the first time.
Moderna Inc.,
the 10-year-old Cambridge, Mass.-based company earlier this week said it had started final-stage testing of a vaccine, had never sold a product on the market. Neither has
Novavax Inc.,
a Gaithersburg, Md.-based drug developer that was awarded the biggest federal grant for vaccine manufacturing to date.
“Just because Novavax has yet to bring a product to market, doesn’t mean that we don’t have a team of people that does have ex